Climbing an art to you?

Climbing is many things to many people. Is it an art form to you? Does it matter if youre first ascent climbing or repeating a route?

asked another way: if ballet (as one example) and other movement specific disciplines are considered art forms, is climbing one to you?

Im just curious as usual. climbing, amongst other things is an art form to me (my relationship/connection to climbing wouldnt change if I didnt see it this way, its JUST a point of view) and one of the most rewarding forms is first ascent climbing. I see a virgin line + a willing climber (with the vision) = an artist with a blank canvas.

I appreciate your time.

No. Ballet is performance art. Climbing is selfish entertainment. People who think climbing is art are self important fart sniffers.

thanks for sharing Ray.

climbing is selfish? I think it CAN be but climbing in itself is not. it all depends on you.

for the record Ray I do usually enjoy my own farts. always have. farting is still fun/funny to me .

Charlie Porter's ascent of Mt. Asgard in Baffin Island in 1975; first grade VII and solo...was art. Another bolted line on Shelf Road...not so much.

Dan McCabe wrote:Charlie Porter's ascent of Mt. Asgard in Baffin Island in 1975; first grade VII and solo...was art. Another bolted line on Shelf Road...not so much.

So trad is like Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel while sport is like paint by numbers on a Denny's place mat.

I'd say climbing is more like a craft than an art.

I was ice climbing at the dam at Chastines Grove (before it was fenced off). The climb topped out very close to an old house that was being used as a grant program to give housing for one year for an artist.

He came out and made a comment about performance art re: ice climbing.

All the world's indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another's audience outside the gilded cage

Yes. I see the most basic definition of art as putting an idea or emotion into a material form for others to observe, and climbing provides opportunities for this. Plenty of great climbers have called their ascents "art," (Bachar, Gill, Ament). Some others like Dan Goodwin or the Ascendance Project are obviously using climbing for performance art.

youtube.com/watch?v=5PywRnB…

youtube.com/watch?v=3_pQQgQ…

Route setting is an art form analogous to choreography or musical composition, in which the artist sets out a prescribed course that still allows the performer to interpret it in his or her own style. Hold shaping and gym design in general allow aesthetics to follow function.

And finally, sites like mp.com allow internet trolls to use climbing as a means of furthering their own art of creating butthurt and anger, which is perhaps the highest art form of all.

Climbing is not art. Unless you think everything is art, but then art has no definition and is a useless descriptor. Art is an idea expressed through a medium. Something new is created or synthesized. Climbing possesses none of these qualities unless you stretch the definitions of these terms to render them meaningless. Creation and discovery are different things.

climbing is problem-solving and trying hard physically, and the goal is to get to the chains or to top out the boulder. not art.

4 Stories Snowy Range, WYO. Spray painted trail markers??

mountainproject.com/v/suspe…

:-D

VaGenius wrote:Now you're just name calling. We all laugh at the people posting up 500 forgettable boulder problems on here, but to some degree or another, it's all art. Suppose a lot of this site is dedicated to the art of the putdown, when you think about it.

ha, the art of the putdown, not everyone gets it, some do, some dont, some can take it like a man and some cry like babies to their mommies/admins. right?

camhead wrote: And finally, sites like mp.com allow internet trolls to use climbing as a means of furthering their own art of creating butthurt and anger, which is perhaps the highest art form of all.

funny stuff

I think it takes some artistic ability to be able to see a chosspile as a fun place to climb. you can always tell from a route if the FA had an artistic eye by seeing where it goes. some of the routes at the Gunks are great examples, you might look at it from the ground and think it has to be hard as hell only to find the FA found a way through that your grandmother could do in her house slippers. the best sport cliffs are always drilled by people with artistic talent, the same cannot be said for Indian Creek.

climbing itself artistic? hmmm

I borrowed this from Clive Staples Lewis:

"In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

Art most assuredly falls with this view. Climbing an art? I definitely approach a repeated route with a mind set of finess. And previously stated that could be selfish but I don't think so.

Art can be fun. Don't be so serious and stuck up that you miss it.

What do I actualy think/feel? Climbing is fun and amazing to watch whether indoor, TR, trad, sport, or aid. But it's just a small glimpse of what I'm hoping for. Theres no consumation of any kind once I've reached the top. ****Although a few weeks ago doing my first successful lead and then belaying The Stoned Master on his way up was fantastic.**** Once I've made it to the top inevitablly there is the packing up and returning to the doldrums. Which in turn leaves me wanting to rope up again... vicious cycle. ;]

phew. I've got a meeting to go to.

I don't know if I'd call it art but it sure does feel beautiful to do it sometimes.

Climbing for me is not an art. I've only been climbing for two years now and I can't quite figure out why I'm obsessed with it but I am. I'm obsessed with the actual act of climbing, the gear, the landscapes, watching people make FA's, watching boulderers (if that's a word) make V10-15 look easy (even though I hate bouldering), successful Alpine summits (especially Ueli), and the list goes on. I can't describe why I'm so obsessed but for me it has a lot to do with being competitive. I was a great high school athlete and pretty good college athlete and I slowly drifted into a lot of boozing and drug use. Got clean and sober about three years ago but had no motivation to stay fit or excel at anything (sports wise) until I started climbing. Climbing for me is a challenge to get better, overcome fear, stay healthy but mostly to escape the busy, commercialized, whacked out priorities the average American calls "life". I'm a happily married home owner with kids in the near future and I wouldn't change that for anything but if I had to I would be a true "dirtbag" and live to climb. For now, I do what I can and push myself to become the 5.11 climber I thought I would never be. (Currently 5.10, thought I'd never even get that far.)

Saw the title and said "this has got to be a Stoned Master thread".

What's up Kyle? Can't wait for the weather to warm up so we can hit up Moc Wall and the boulder garden!

Is climbing an art?

I always thought of climbing as a discipline, like a martial art. Is it art like music, visual, etc? Yeah, it could be. Depends on the person's approach. Dean Potter calls his climbing art, and I would agree the dude's an artist. But I look at along the lines of being like a martial art is the respect that it's so physically and mentally demanding and in a sense (not literally) you are in combat with the rock as you challenge it. Not to mention if you're a trad climber and risking serious injury - not limited to trad, but you know what I mean.

rging wrote: So trad is like Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel while sport is like paint by numbers on a Denny's place mat.

Exactly!!!

MC Poopypants wrote:I'd say climbing is more like a craft than an art.

So we can all expect a hand painted place mat from you next Christmas?

Ben Beckerich wrote: Climbing is a fruitless, 100% self-gratifying experience. It does not benefit our families, our offspring, future generations, starving children. It doesn't cure diseases or solve philosophical quandaries. Non-climbers are only barely aware that we exist, and have less awareness for what we do. Climbing isn't an "art."

I like how the first four sentences of this have nothing whatsoever to do with the fifth. Art does not have to benefit society, or be widely known, to be art or to be worthwhile, and neither does climbing. As for solving philosophical quandaries, Twight and Bonatti might have something to say about that, not to mention Petrarch, Gesner, Coffey, and Taylor.