>ambiguity=creative laziness Been seeing this as a response

Ambiguity isnt always creative laziness, but its a common way for poor art to hide itself.

>Somebody takes a shit on a canvas with the word "Love" written underneath
>"You just dont get it, man!"

>if it has one meaning it's not lazy
>if it has two or more it's lazy
Finnegans Wake is often lazy because it has two bland meanings where it could easily have several more if Joyce had spoken Irish well.

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>>8653985
Its funny because often I see it the other way around. People who are incapable or too lazy to examine a piece of art will chop it up to ambiguity. A good example is Birdman, a great film but one of my friends said it lacked because "it meant nothing." When I tried to address some of his issues by referring to parts of the film that i thought were full of meaning he would just pass me off with his tired replies.
I do think the line is very thin between ambiguity and artistic merit, and for a piece of art to mean something the artist shouldn't have to directly speak it in the work. Its suiting that you used 2001 as your example; the ending is so open to interpretation that its hard to say what Kubrick really meant. However, if we pay attention to the rest of the film and try and define all its parts together we can reach something which "makes sense" ; reoccurring themes and motifs can give us more insight. In other words, if a piece of art is worth its merit it has to have some sort of structure, it doesnt need to shout out what its trying to say, it doesnt need to be obvious, but if you pay attention and know what to look for you can be confident in your analysis. A good artist who wants to say something has to have some way of directing us there.
A whole lot of art falls into the ambiguity category, where what is presented is so unstructured that the artist has done a poor job at directing us anywhere. A good example for this is 'Sirens of Titan' by Vonnegut, a funny book but in the end it meant nothing because of how highly ambiguous each part was. In college a professor of mine taught this and you could tell the entire class was uncertain how to interpret it in any personal way. I mean there's so much presented in it, its like everything is a symbol or a metaphor and you know this but since the book is unstructured you don't know what they are symbols and metaphors for.

>>8653985
It's not always true but sometimes it is. Depends on whether the ambiguity actually makes things more interesting or is just obscurity for the sake of obscurity.

>>8654064
I'm going to add to this and maybe distill it a little bit, and say that "ambiguity" isn't objective and a lot of people finds works of art "ambiguous" which are completely understandable and pretty obvious to someone with a background in art

people are just naturally closed-minded. like when you show the average an american how other cultures eat insects, and they get grossed out and say "that's not good food". just because you don't recognise something doesn't mean its not there.

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>>8654076
> "ambiguity" isn't objective and a lot of people finds works of art "ambiguous" which are completely understandable and pretty obvious to someone with a background in art
I think it is objective though. The difference between me slamming verbs and nouns together vs Fitzgerald writing characters and themes shows this difference. You might say "Well slamming verbs and nouns together isn't art" but i could just rebuttal with "art is subjective". There has to be somewhere to draw the line; on one end of the spectrum you have me throwing words together and at the other a writer like Fitzgerald putting them together all the same, but with a closer connection to what art truly represents. If we are to accept that art isnt as subjective as people may say then we have to be willing to admit there are bad approaches to exploring something and clear approaches to exploring something. My professor found a TON of meaning Sirens of Titan but I don't think it was as obvious as he thought it was, only with a whole ton of existentialism under his belt could he find anything worth saying, and if thats the case how can you say hes reading Vonnegut and not all those other writers instead since its they who made the writing clear?

There's nothing wrong with ambiguity. It can be used conventionally and not, the former in a way that's inconspicuous to an audience: for example, in a crime story if it's ambiguous whether one person committed the murder or another, it can be riveting in itself and in the typical sense (of good plot and action and all that), or convey a sense of uncertainty that's key to the story and completes the story in a satisfactory way, a result which audiences don't actually believe requires answers to everything, or at least that's not how they respond to stories.

The problem that causes people to complain about ambiguity is disclarity, or rather, the failure of the artist to communicate. It isn't ambiguity that's the problem, but that the story at some point stopped eliciting responses, because it stopped being coherent in its communication. This happens with perfectly unambiguous stories all the time, and is actually the problem of most bad stories: incoherent character development, pointless plots, so on.

Furthermore, story communicates with the advantages of its medium as well as conventional language. 2001 for example is ambiguous in the end, sure, but not unclear or muddled. Confusing, maybe, but the pieces are there to guide you to a conclusion that resonates (if one that differs from somebody else's - all the better, that the story contains multitudes.) It's subjective, sure, but I would say it communicates, in a clear fashion, transcendence, otherworldliness, and a reckoning with human existence and potential.

It's a conversation, it has two parts, two positions. Meaning is not something that an object contains, but something you cannot help but see in some object, or cannot help but to expect it from that object.

I don't care the slightest if the artist is lazy or not, how many hours he's spent on his piece or whatever. What matters is effectively what he says and what you hear in what he says. If when facing ambiguity you assume it is because the artist must have been too lazy to come up with a straight definitive answer, then this says much more about what you are expecting from it than what the artist was actually doing.

The artist is not sole responsible for his artwork, the seer is just as responsible for definitive answers and ambiguity. It depends on what you actually want with the artistic experience and what bothers you when you see it lacking.

The study of literature is predicated on literature being ambiguous.

>>8654040
fpbp

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>>8654296
The question isn't whether or not it is predicated on being ambiguous its whether or not literature and art can be too ambiguous.

>>8653985

It depends on whether you see a novel as an essay or an experience.

>>8653985
Non-ambiguity is laziness on the consumer's part.

>>8654116
But f Scott's writing isn't objectively better than you putting random words together. Quality of art is literally subjective

I would say it depends on how much is used

if its all ambiguous then its lazy or half hearted

if theres no ambiguity then nothing is left to the imagination.

as with all things, a balance and a "right place at the right time" is probably the best way to go.

no, valid criticisms aren't just saying something you believe without any evidence or reasoning on your part

>>8654040
i think far more anti-moderns talk about shit on canvas than modern/contemporary artists. people take it as a 'worst case' but it's so rare in the art world it's hard to imagine why anyone thinks its representative

>>8653985
If a work becomes far too ambiguous, with no or infinite plausible interpretations, it becomes pretty meaningless and yeah you could say it's somewhat lazy. Unless the artist is solely relying on the experience or feeling of the work, which is what I imagine Kubrick was doing with parts of 2001.
Finnegans Wake is not fat word diarrhea tho. In a way it is, mish mashing a bunch of different languages together, but just about everything in it is calculated multilingual allusions. It's dream language that sounds really familiar if you have knowledge of what he's talking about, but since there's so much shit that he alludes to you'll have to look a lot of it up or use some kind of annotations. But it's not just a bunch of meaningless ambiguous noises

>>8653985
Ambiguity is a language that very few people speak.