The urinal is not art. The reaction to the urinal is art on a mastercraft level. No one has quite reached the same level of artistry since. You can duct tape a banana to a wall, but it just doesn’t create the same outrage as the urinal did.
art can have function and vice versa. A door handle is art. A lightswitch is art. They were designed and manufactured. Do(e) A Deer from the Sound of Music is just the most basic scale in music theory pretty much in chromatic order. It’s still a song. Same for the Alphabet song, it’s lyrics are just the alphabet, it’s still art.
Toilets are also art. If you really wanted a toilet that had no artistry at all it’d be an uneven hole in the floor made with a hammer.
I think that would then be performance art.
How about piss christ?
So what you mean to say is: “Trolling is a art.”
*an art.
(Unless your trolling grammer nazis.)Well fuck me, got me good.
Did we read the same series of posts? I thought they made it very clear that the urinal is art and explained how the reaction was desired and how the artist tried to create that reaction?
Great post and very good art.
At first I thought this tradpost was pro pissing on feet instead of in urinals
They say “traditional art”, but they mean “shut up and paint, with no subversive messages hidden”.
But the thing is, the time period they consider “traditional art” is chock full of artists being told to “shut up and paint”, and not appreciating that very much and deciding to sneak subversive messages into their works, knowing that their patrons would be too dumb to catch on.
In effect, they’re saying “can we go back to a time when I didn’t understand that you thought I was dumb?”
Shall we talk about Caravaggio? Most notably Basket of fruit?
He was an atheist sneaking anti-church messages in his church-bought paintings. Iirc he got found out a couple of times and people weren’t super happy if being played for fools.
I had to look it up; what a beautiful painting!
From the outset it looks quite normal and enticing but on further examination:
Sorry for the wall of text but I found this fascinating, also serves a great alt text (which I don’t know how to add with my client) or for a screen reader
… a good-sized, light-red peach attached to a stem with wormholes in the leaf resembling damage by oriental fruit moth (Orthosia hibisci). Beneath it is a single bicolored apple, shown from a stem perspective with two insect entry holes, probably codling moth, one of which shows secondary rot at the edge; one blushed yellow pear with insect predations resembling damage by leaf roller (Archips argyospita); four figs, two white and two purple—the purple ones dead ripe and splitting along the sides, plus a large fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose (Glomerella cingulata); and a single unblemished quince with a leafy spur showing fungal spots. There are four clusters of grapes, black, red, golden, and white; the red cluster on the right shows several mummied fruit, while the two clusters on the left each show an overripe berry. There are two grape leaves, one severely desiccated and shriveled while the other contains spots and evidence of an egg mass. In the right part of the basket are two green figs and a ripe black one is nestled in the rear on the left. On the sides of the basket are two disembodied shoots: to the right is a grape shoot with two leaves, both showing severe insect predations resembling grasshopper feeding; to the left is a floating spur of quince or pear.
For the symbology (of which I remember only parts)
The apple is a symbol of Christ, so have a worm hole undercuts Christ himself.
The wine grapes are symbol of the resurrection, but they are sick.
The figs… maybe you can guess? Another Christian symbol, looking sickly and overshadowed.
The basket itself is a symbol of the plenty that God bestowed mankind, and is overhanging the side of the table, ready to fall.
This painting metaphorically says “there is no god, and definitely no Christian God”
Thanks for posting the picture, I still haven’t figured out how to do it!
I came here expecting tired discussions about how “modern art” is all just
degeneratemoney laundering, but it seems like AI is the new big topicI’m coming to despise “modern art”. Or abstract art. . Or any art that makes itself look pointless at first glance and hides its meaning behind levels of “clever” symbology.
You want great abstract art? Here.
Us seeing this in 2025? Have to analyze it. And that confuses us into thinking great art requires analysis to understand. But the target audience IMMEDIATELY understood what the point was.
Art is propaganda. Art must be propaganda. Because art without a message is art without meaning. And art without meaning is a waste of paint and paper.
You can send a message however you want. But if your target audience doesn’t understand your message you’ve failed. Subtle and complex artwork that require deep study to decipher their meanings are nothing but aesthetic masturbation.
The greatest artistic victory of the America right wing state was to convince generations of left wing artists that great art transcends politics.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some people genuinely like pealing off meanings of the art piece they are looking at. Others are looking for an immediate emotional connection. Btw Guernica was infinitely criticized when it was created because the audience did not understand it. Now it’s well known and appreciated and -I would dare say- related to, but that is a cultural evolution following the successes of Picasso’s work.
The Guernica ain’t abstract, it’s cubist.
remember kids, it doesn’t need to be difficult to make to be art, it just needs to make you think of it as art
I think a lot of people seem to think that if it’s in a museum it’s good and we put all good art in museums.
Fountain is unfathomably based. I’ve used this history lesson to reassure my cousin who started painting for his PTSD and got told by a bunch of shitheads that he wasn’t a “Real Artist” when he sold some art.
This stuff is a litmus test for when you’re in a culture war with people trying to hide the fact they’re warring with you on every front they can
If he sold art he’s definitely an artist.
If he hadn’t sold any he would be too, but selling it is undsniable proof that someone else across him as an artist.
People were still assholes. I think they just wanted to hurt him because of their own internal problems and he appeared as an easy target
Only people who don’t understand art say that people “aren’t real artists.” It’s the most obvious way to know that someone’s opinion isn’t worth listening to.
Perhaps, I think I’m guilty of that too in this exact thread. The generative AI question is a focal point if such notions and it doesn’t seem like there will ever be a consensus without at least some learned people asserting that something isn’t art.
i’ma change my mind about it when those damn scrapers stop to think
I mean the toilet is quite obviously art, you can understand exactly what the artist was expressing. AI art literally isn’t art because it lacks any expression or meaning.
Evidence? Show me an expressive piece of AI “art”. There is none.
AI art, in my mind, is art in the same way that “photography” is art. It’s people using a tool.
AI art is unsatisfying not because it’s not art, but because it doesn’t have as much depth or intention behind it.
In the image above, you know exactly what I’m trying to convey and what references I’m making in doing so. But knowing that it’s AI, you also know I spent all of 10 seconds on it for a laugh. I could have put in more work to flesh out how the details should look, and to get everything just right, but the tool makes it too easy to get “close enough”, so there’s no push to refine, get the details right, and put the time into it that would make someone else feel compelled to appreciate the attention or statement.
My hand drawn representation of the same idea in about the same time conveys roughly the same expression and meaning, if we adjust for “drawing with thumb on a phone”, “bad handwriting in general”, and "why did my own default to… Fuschia? "
The same thing happened to photography, and other kinds of modern art, too. Things are often excluded from being art until they are included (to at least a subset of people).
With AI it is often questionable how much ‘intent’ someone has put into a work: ‘wrote a simple trivial prompt, generated a few images, shared all of them’ results in uninteresting slop, while ‘spent a lot of time to make the AI generate exactly what you want, even coming up with weird ways to use the model (like this / non-archive link)’ is a lot more interesting in my view.
The difference is photography can be art, but it isn’t always. Photo composition and content are used to convey meaning. The photo is a tool under the artist’s complete control. The photo is not art on its own. Just like if you accidentally spill paint on a canvas it isn’t necessarily art, a photo taken without intent isn’t necessarily art. If I accidentally hit the camera button on my phone that doesn’t make me a photographer.
AI generated images can not do this. The user can give a prompt, but they don’t actually have control over the tool. They can modify their prompt to get different outputs, but the tool is doing its own thing. The user just has to keep trying until they get an output they like, but it isn’t done by their control. It’s similar to a user always accidentally doing things, until they get what they want. If you record every moment of your life you’re likely to have some frames that look good, but you aren’t a photographer because you didn’t intend to get that output.
The difference is photography can be art, but it isn’t always. Photo composition and content are used to convey meaning. The photo is a tool under the artist’s complete control. The photo is not art on its own. Just like if you accidentally spill paint on a canvas it isn’t necessarily art, a photo taken without intent isn’t necessarily art. If I accidentally hit the camera button on my phone that doesn’t make me a photographer.
I don’t completely agree. While an accident is one example where intent is missing, publishing accidental shots could be a form of art in its own way as the act of publishing itself has intent associated with it.
Furthermore, nature photography is in my view also art, but provides much less control than studio photography, as the scene and subject are free to do whatever they want.
AI generated images can not do this. The user can give a prompt, but they don’t actually have control over the tool. They can modify their prompt to get different outputs, but the tool is doing its own thing. The user just has to keep trying until they get an output they like, but it isn’t done by their control. It’s similar to a user always accidentally doing things, until they get what they want. If you record every moment of your life you’re likely to have some frames that look good, but you aren’t a photographer because you didn’t intend to get that output.
I don’t think recording everything would make it less of an artpiece: you would have intentionally chosen to record continuously to capture that frame, and skimmed though those frames to find the right one. Like splattering paint on a canvas intentionally, you don’t intend to control the full picture - where the paint ends up - but rather the conceptual idea of a splatter of paint, leaving the details, in part, up to physics.
There are limits to what repeatedly prompting an AI model can do, but that doesn’t stop you from doing other things with the output, or toying with how it functions or how it is used, as my example shows.
While I wouldn’t discount something if it was created using AI, I need there to be something for me to interact with or think about in a piece of art. As the creation of an image is effectively done by probability, anything missing in the prompt will in all likelihood be filled with a probabilistically plausible answer, which makes the output rather boring and uninteresting. This doesn’t mean that AI cannot be used to create art, but it does mean you need to put in some effort to make it so.
I don’t completely agree. While an accident is one example where intent is missing, publishing accidental shots could be a form of art in its own way as the act of publishing itself has intent associated with it.
Yeah, find interesting accidental photos that tell a story would be a creative work of art. The photos wouldn’t be before, but putting them together could be.
Furthermore, nature photography is in my view also art, but provides much less control than studio photography, as the scene and subject are free to do whatever they want.
Like I said, composition and subject are important. That doesn’t mean you stage them. It means make something interesting out of the scene.
I don’t think recording everything would make it less of an artpiece: you would have intentionally chosen to record continuously to capture that frame, and skimmed though those frames to find the right one.
Yeah, the act of choosing a frame could be artistic. That’s not what I meant. I meant an amazing image could exist within the frames. It isn’t art just because it’s there. Sure, something could be done with it to make it art. Like you imply, intention is the important part. You’re agreeing, but you’re adding intention to all the examples I’m giving. Without the intention I assume you agree that they aren’t art.
There are limits to what repeatedly prompting an AI model can do, but that doesn’t stop you from doing other things with the output…
Sure, you can do things with the output. I’ve proposed the idea of making a piece about the soulessness of AI generated images, and making a collage of AI generated images next to artist created ones, to show how it’s missing the creative spark a human can add. This would be taking AI generated images and making art out of them. They wouldn’t be art right out of the model though.
That’s the beauty of art. It spawns discussion and it can’t be nailed down to any singular definition. You and the person you responded to are completely correct
I think with ai art though the issue is not the user’s ability to tweak the prompts but more the fact that anything generated from an AI is stolen work
If there was a way to train your own ai (llm, genai) off of your own creations or the works of others with their explicit consent then I’d consider that art. But the biggest issue right now is many of these ais are using stolen work across the board to generate their images, regardless of how much time and care goes into crafting the perfect prompt
I think that is less of a problem with the technology itself, but rather in how it is currently used or created. I wouldn’t say that anything generated with AI is stolen work, as that predicates that AI necessarily involves stealing.
I vaguely remember Adobe Firefly using images only with proper licensing to the point they will allow themselves to be legally held responsible (though some AI generated work did make it into their stock image site, which makes the ethics part vague, even if it will in all likelihood be legally impossible to pin down). Sadly, this is Adobe, and this stuff is all behind closed doors, you have to pay them pretty significant sum and you can’t really mess with the internals there.
So for now there is a choice between ethics, openness, and capability (pick at most two). Which, frankly, is a terrible state to be in.
That’s what I said too! Is there another way to view that link? I’m either struggling with opening it in my browser or my current VPN server
I’ve added a non archive link.
Ayyyy, thank you that’s pretty cool. This is how we got all those pictures hiding shrek’s face, isn’t it?
Yup, or at least a refined version of this idea. The paper they reference on the technique has more examples.
You’re only “not an artist” if you’re not making art. If you make something and don’t want it to be art, then it’s not art, and you’re not an artist.
That’s about it as not artist goes.
That got me thinking;
a welder creating a sculpture: artista welder making a tool: artisan
Is the tool a functional piece of art?
It can be. If presented as art, then yes. If crafted so masterfully that it’s perceived as art, then also yes.
If neither intended nor received as art: no.The functional contains beauty. It can be artistic to remind someone that functionality is a type of beauty. It’s also possible to create an expression of form so perfectly that you can’t help but notice the beauty.
While attempting to find some images of beautiful tools (I was thinking fine wood carving tools from the mid 1800s were a good bet), I found this: https://fortune.com/article/beauties-of-the-common-tool-walker-evans/ I think it does a good job conveying the notion. :)
I was one of those people who derided “Fountain,” until about thirty seconds ago. Thank you for this.
Conversely, I was one of those people who were thrilled by “Fountain” from the second they first heard about it. Thank you for this.
👌😁
I didn’t care about fountain and now I still don’t. But the discussion was engaging, so I kept reading.
I don’t think he’s a genius, maybe he was just having fun and doing inside jokes to himself while creating all of this. Art can bring out emotions, one of which is laughter. Who knows besides himself?
I had a great teacher that did a wonderful job of contextualising it so loved it when I first was told the story.
It’s worth taking a dip into the history books to get a better sense of art culture at the time. It doesn’t ring of genius without it but when you realise just how audacious and tangential to the norm it was chefs kiss. Beautiful.
It literally takes the piss.
No, that was Andres Serrano
Piss Christ is another classic troll.
None of those are pictures of the original by the way.
The signature on the original is upside-down.
I agree that the scooper is too flimsy, but I’ve used a lot of shovels with square handles, what’s the problem there?
I too had an issue with this point and I don’t think the handle shape has anything to do with the title. I feel it was misconstrued
I’ve shoveled many driveways with a shovel that looks just like that and even looked up snow shovels just to be sure I didn’t misremember
Looking up “shovel” shows a majority of tools that have the same handle so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This square handle?
I can’t find any rectangle rods even looking for “shovel square handle”.
Agreed about the handle. And nowadays that scooper just looks like a really cheap “flat” variety, though you can get better ones that are “shaped”. It’s hard to tell about the material and attachment from a photo, but it looks usable. Dunno what the state-of-the-art in snow shovels was back then, but I think OP-commenter is reaching. (I like conceptual art as much as anyone else, fwiw…)
I had to think about it a bit, too. I think the “square handle” refers to the cross-section of the pole rather than the handle at the end. It’s the only way I could make sense of it.
If unsure why the square pole would be problematic, imagine using a snowshovel - you’re clearing the driveway and the snow is heavy. Are you able to scoop the snow away just using one hand on the end of the handle?
No, invariably, you’re holding one hand on the end, and using the other hand on the pole to lift the heavy load and contribute to the smooth “scoop” motion of shoveling. Like the oar of a canoe, you don’t get good control unless you use both hands.
Now imagine what it would feel like to hold onto a square pole instead. Every time you pivot the shovel to dump out the snow, you’re turning the corners of the pole against your hand. Even with gloves on, that’s got to get uncomfortable quickly.
Perhaps the original commenter got some words mixed up, who knows really. But I can definitely see how the design in question wouldn’t be practical for actual shoveling use.
I think the “square handle” refers to the cross-section of the pole rather than the handle at the end.
oooh, that makes sense. the image above seems to be broken now, but wikipedia has a good pic of it. Not entirely convinced – I’ve seen worse designs on real products, but I get what OP’s trying to say.
what the fuck is fountain
That urinal most of the post is about
Please do pee on the art, it would be a very funny news story
