55th ISU Congress: Who voted "For" and "Against" anonymous judging | Page 7 | Golden Skate

55th ISU Congress: Who voted "For" and "Against" anonymous judging

Joined
Jun 21, 2003
One story:


Another story:

I think there is also a question of public perception, The ISU would be best served by avoiding the appearance of sneaky back-room shenanigans, however innocent of such charges they might be in the majority of cases. By going all cloak and dagger it makes people think they are up to no good even when they are trying their best.

What is better, a secret ballot or open public records? To me, that is an easy question to answer. The privacy rights of the people should be protected. But as for public officials acting in the course of their governmental duties, the brighter the glare of the spotlight the better.

Figure skating judges are like public officials, not like "the people" (That's us. ;) )
 

gmyers

Record Breaker
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Mar 6, 2010
For anonymous was South Korea? Lol! But abstaining is Legit! At first I thougt it failed because not enough countries voted.
 
Joined
Feb 25, 2010
I respect your subjective opinion that this is subjective :bow:

But I still stick to my subjective opinion that, if you want to play with other kids then honesty matters :cool:

Figure skating was built as a sport and an art since it creation. Even the english style was seen partially as an art, a rigid one, but still an art on the ice. You just have to read the old books (and I don't mean from the 90' but more from the XIXth-first XXth part) to convince yourself. COP tried to kill the art, yes and almost did it by now. But art is subjective and then IMO FS can't not be too.
 

Anna K.

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Figure skating was built as a sport and an art since it creation. Even the english style was seen partially as an art, a rigid one, but still an art on the ice. You just have to read the old books (and I don't mean from the 90' but more from the XIXth-first XXth part) to convince yourself. COP tried to kill the art, yes and almost did it by now. But art is subjective and then IMO FS can't not be too.

Yeah well, so eventually they have created something that’s neither sport nor art :laugh:

Statements like “art is subjective and then IMO FS can't not be too” are basically clichés that help to get away with fooling people. What makes art subjective? This is because the process of creation and perception of art is thoroughly individual, lonely if you like. This is where creative freedom is based upon; everyone is free to have his/her own rules of art simply because no one else will be affected. Sports and even contests are wholly different issue. A group of people get together and agree upon terms and conditions. Well, they’re free to agree that there will be none, in which case FS rulebook would content one short sentence “It’s subjective so every judge must pick the winner according their tastes”; but in FS they somehow didn’t and eventually the only possible artist that can be here is the spectator :)

So basically, this is not a question what is right or wrong; it’s the question what the involved parts have agreed upon and if they keep their word. I have to admit that FS is an interesting case from sociology point of view because there are lots of so called “silent agreements” and this is interesting how it will develop further, especially its relationship with general public.
 

Sandpiper

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Apr 16, 2014
Statements like “art is subjective and then IMO FS can't not be too” are basically clichés that help to get away with fooling people. What makes art subjective? This is because the process of creation and perception of art is thoroughly individual, lonely if you like. This is where creative freedom is based upon; everyone is free to have his/her own rules of art simply because no one else will be affected. Sports and even contests are wholly different issue. A group of people get together and agree upon terms and conditions.
Art does not exist in a vacuum. Art is shared among people, among audiences, just like figure skating. Art, too, has its own rules--"show don't tell" for writing, for instance. Art has its own techniques--learning different styles of painting, much like skaters learning to skate to different types of music. Art even has its judges, though they are not so apparent: the publishers who can buy your book or throw it back into the slush pile; the passersby on the streets who see your samples and decide if they want their portrait done or not; the readers who can choose to buy your book and support your career--don't have enough of them, and you don't have much of a career at all.

We're not going to all agree on art and we're not going to all agree on figure skating. In most cases, neither side is wrong. Isn't that enough to say that some aspects of figure skating are subjective, at least?
 

Anna K.

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^
Why, like I wrote in my answer to Sam-Squantch, I have no problem to admit that all aspects of FS are subjective. It depends on the discourse we choose. If to ignore the fact that social legacy exists, then everything and everyone is subjective in this world and no objectivity exists when it's about the crooked timber of humanity :laugh:

What about your persuasions about rules that rule art, you’re free to believe into them but if you’re artist, I would suggest you not to. Creators who take for a rule well known know-hows are at risk to get bashed for being “craftsmen not artists”, “commercialized”, and “stale”. Relying on technique can certainly help to become a well-paid craftsman but for a true artist, more creativity is expected and this is exactly because art doesn’t exist in vacuum. The trick is, the closest thing to social legacy in arts is the relation between tradition and novelty and, instead of following the rules of tradition, the artist is expected to innovate and change them.
Not like FS community is against this – I guess many would like it to happen, especially fans – but this is not what pays in form of medals because then, there are rules :laugh:
 

Sandpiper

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Apr 16, 2014
What about your persuasions about rules that rule art, you’re free to believe into them but if you’re artist, I would suggest you not to.
I would not suggest this. Artists must learn the rules before they break them. If you're skilled enough to break them, then you probably don't need me suggesting it. Just like how, in figure skating, you must first learn good basics and good jump technique, before you run all wild with "interesting music choices" or "innovative positions." The rules of writing--for instance, the use of strong nouns and verbs as opposed to adding a million adjectives and adverbs--are there for a reason, just like good jump technique.

Art is a combination of novelty and tradition. It is not just all about novelty, because you need a certain amount of tradition to connect with your audience, who grew up with those traditions. The best art tackles those traditions in an interesting way, and brings something new to the table. The artist does not sit alone in a dark room, free from all influences in the world.

But most of all, art is about quality. I can go and write a story in second person, future tense, and it would definitely be unique... but I suspect it'll be one heck of a crappy story.

Ideally, the rules of figure skating should encourage both: Innovations and quality. Artists innovate with new perspectives, new ways of looking at the world. Figure skaters innovate with new jumps and combinations, spin positions, unique footwork, and interesting music choices. At the same time, you need quality in both art and figure skating. Even if you land a quad loop, you won't win if you fall in every spin and single all your other jumps. Right now, COP isn't the best at encouraging either innovation or quality, hence why I suggest rewarding hard combinations, revamping the step sequence levels (choreographic step was a move in the right direction), and punishing falls more.
 

Anna K.

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I would not suggest this. Artists must learn the rules before...

A discussion as productive as making points about which came first, the chicken or the egg [yawn]. If you want to continue anyway: you still didn’t convince me that Marcel Proust, sweating, learned the rules of literary tradition before he wrote In Search of Lost Time :)

I can go and write a story in second person, future tense, and it would definitely be unique...

It wouldn’t. We already have Ten Commandments [couldn’t resist].

Ideally, the rules of figure skating should encourage both: Innovations and quality.

Ehm, I hope you’re aware that in real life it’s all about a bunch of boring officials who come together and vote their “yes” and “no” [and why we have this discussion for] which eventually decide what you will do or not?
 

Sandpiper

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Apr 16, 2014
What exactly is your point here? William Faulkner didn't learn the rules of grammar before he broke them? Skating isn't subjective because it's a sport (if that's the case, I'd argue it shouldn't be a sport before saying it shouldn't be subjective)? You've given up on the officials (or find them boring) and don't want to discuss it anymore?
 

Anna K.

Final Flight
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Feb 22, 2014
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Latvia
What exactly is your point here? William Faulkner didn't learn the rules of grammar before he broke them? Skating isn't subjective because it's a sport (if that's the case, I'd argue it shouldn't be a sport before saying it shouldn't be subjective)? You've given up on the officials (or find them boring) and don't want to discuss it anymore?

Whatever my point/your point is, it doesn't look like we get them well enough to continue. I think I'll wait until somebody else bites :)
 
Joined
Feb 25, 2010
Yeah well, so eventually they have created something that’s neither sport nor art :laugh:

Exactly and that's what you seem to miss. It is and art and a sport. Both. You can't separate because then it's another sport. It is written in all the books from the one who created this sport. And even the one after.

Hence the 6.0 because you can judges art just by comparing it, personally. I mean you can't give an objective value because it would change from one to another. That's why 6.0 was about ranking the skaters higher or lower relative to how the others skated. And not giving 42.025452 which is pointless.

And for the sport part, there always was a technical part. This is what I guess you would call the sport part. By now, thanks to Cinquanta whom doesn't understand anything about skating and doesn't care, we now have the artistic mark just put at the same level as the technical one.

Figure skating has a tradition, a very long one. Ignore it as you want, it won't disapear. Thanks to a capitalistic system (earn the most without taking care of the consequenses aka stereotyped skating) which is very well implanted in our western civilisations, figure skating lost it soul. The capitalistic logic was also bring to skating, and killed anything that isn't always quantifiable in the same way. The system identify this as an error or a threat and thus kills it (= no credit given, no points if you don't close your circular step sequences not point if you don't hit so many edges even though all this is pointless in an overall impression a program should give).

I won't go further as it seems to be pointless. Feel free to laugh at this. I'm not an english speaker by birth, please note that maybe I didn't expressed very well what I had in mind.
 
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
OK, I’ll bite. ;) Is tracing school figures art? Certainly there is beauty in the geometric precision of a well-done figure. Trixie Schuba made us oh and ah, never mind that Janet Lynn’s free skating was coming up next.

On the other hand, everyone did exactly the same figures with little opportunity for originality or even for individual flair.

Is tracing school figures sport? One must perform a demanding physical exercise to exacting standards, in competition with other skilled and well-trained athletes. Higher, faster, stronger, more precise. Darts?

There used to be competitions in “special figures” (or “fancy figures”). I don’t know whether the contestants got to make up their own figures or not. This sport was contested in the Olympics only once, in 1908, with Nikolai Panin of Russia winning the gold medal. By the way, this was the summer Olympics. If the winter Olympics ever folds, figure skating can go back to the summer Olympics as an indoor sport (or art). Also at these Olympic games, in London, in the tug-o-war event British teams swept the podium winning gold, silver and bronze. I don’t know if there were charges of home cooking or not.

To me, the argument is better posed by slipping in the word “performing” before art. Figure skating is a sport tempered with a performing arts component. Performing arts include puppet shows, jugglers, dog and pony acts – there must be a place for figure skating without requiring skaters to be Michelangelo.
 
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dorispulaski

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But tracing figures originally was an art. Check out the Special Figures Gillis Grafstrom created :) if you can find the video. An interview with his widow was done as part of a piece on compulsory figures being abolished. Mrs. Grafstrom showed drawings of his figures, which were very complex designs indeed.

Some of the special figures at the 1908 Olympics are among the group shown here, with photos of a great many skaters doing school figures.
http://skatingdomo.wordpress.com/history/history-of-skating-elements/

There's a great special figure photo on this Pinterest page, plus many drawings of Special Figures!!!! :) :love:
http://www.skatingaheadofthecurve.com/SpecialFigures.html


http://www.pinterest.com/njfsf/go-figure-8/

The art of the figures was first abolished in favor of having set compulsory figures, so that competitors' skills could be compared, apples to apples, in a more sport-like way...and, the heart having been cut out of them, they eventually died.

There is a moral in there..
 
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Brenda

On the Ice
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Jan 25, 2004
OK, I’ll bite. ;) Is tracing school figures art? Certainly there is beauty in the geometric precision of a well-done figure. Trixie Schuba made us oh and ah, never mind that Janet Lynn’s free skating was coming up next.

I don't have an answer for art per se (maybe school figures is more craft than art?), but I always thought what Bertrand Russell said about the beauty of mathematics could apply to school figures as well. Replace mathematics with school figures, and painting/music/poetry with free skating.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
 

gkelly

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Joined
Jul 26, 2003
But tracing figures originally was an art. Check out the figure Gillis Grafstrom created :) if you can find the video. An interview with his widow was done as part of a piece on compulsory figures being abolished. Mrs. Grafstrom showed drawings of his figures, which were very complex designs indeed.

Some of them are in the group shown here:
http://skatingdomo.wordpress.com/history/history-of-skating-elements/

Those are the "special figures" which were never really part of the organized sport -- competed at Olympics once, as Mathman says, and never at Worlds or Europeans.

The art of the figures was first abolished in favor of having set compulsory figures, so that competitors' skills could be compared, apples to apples, in a more sport-like way...and, the heart having been cut out of them, they eventually died.

School figures lasted for approximately a century and died because freeskating had become popular enough to lift an obscure niche sport to one of broader interest to spectators and practitioners, for whom the expense and tedium of school figures outweighed the apples-to-apples comparisons. (And also the difficulty of anyone not on the ice with the skaters and judges verifying whether they were being judged accurately.)

Special figures -- i.e., tracing as art -- never gained much of a foothold in the sport and were not any more suited to spectatorship than school figures.

One objection to them within the skating community at the time was that the movements required to create those intricate patterns on the ice were jerky and unpleasant to watch.

"Artistry" of execution in the early years of the sport seemed to be almost synonymous with "graceful."
 

dorispulaski

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Yes, watching a painter paint is not necessarily a great joy either. It doesn't keep the result from being art.
 

Anna K.

Final Flight
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Mathman - I liked the bite about “performing art component”. The word choice matters indeed, given that “art” may mean quite a lot (so, art stands for “quality, skill”, as well as “creativity, freedom”, or for “trade, branch” as such or “beauty, harmony” as such) plus there are aspects of social and political development, like machin pointed out :) (it’s a smile, machin; note that I don’t laugh!). What makes it interesting about FS, is that human body is the tool [of performing art] so there are natural limits before any rules. I’m not the FS history expert but it looks logical to me that earlier in its development FS had more “creativity” and less “skills” in its performing art component because the exploration of natural limits was in progress. At a certain stage, both sport and art really might seem applicable to this process [exploring the limits of what human body can do when skating] trying to achieve more both in direction of athletics and expression. However today, FS has pretty much hit the limits; it’s significantly more about “skills” than about “creativity” and it often fails to live up to the expectation that general public has about either art or sport. In other words, it has become boring. [Well, and then there is the organization of the system that doesn’t help the matters.] That’s about my vision of sport/art in figure skating.

(I’m still waiting if somebody bites the points regarding subjectivity of the individual/collective agreement but I can imagine that it might be far less interesting to discuss :p )
 
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

:rock:

Yes, watching a painter paint is not necessarily a great joy either. It doesn't keep the result from being art.

Ice sculpture is another good example.

But the judges would have their work cut out for them. Beautiful, grotesque, or hilarious? :)

http://www.noupe.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/07sb21WLlg1.jpg
 
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
(I’m still waiting if somebody bites the points regarding subjectivity of the individual/collective agreement but I can imagine that it might be far less interesting to discuss :p )

The trick is, the closest thing to social legacy in arts is the relation between tradition and novelty and, instead of following the rules of tradition, the artist is expected to innovate and change them.

I know nothing about art -- but I know what I like. Here is a lovely handbag, featuring the Pell Bridge, named after Michelle Kwan's grandfather-in-law:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bp-KkzUCEAAA6BX.jpg

That is a very cool point about the tension between tradition and the breaking of tradition. There are a few concepts that do seem to be universally valued in art, such as symmetry and ratio/proportion. But then come startling works that strike us exactly because of a violent violation of these expectations.

The relation between art and craft is also intriguing. People who self-conscious;ly sit down to write the Great American Novel usually come up empty, while many of the towering works of literature were jotted down by some guy simply trying to make a buck (Shakespeare, Dickens). I wonder if the same thing doesn't happen in figure skating sometimes. The choreographic masterpiece falls flat while the girl who is just wants to land her triple flip ends up with the crowd- (and judges-) pleasing gem.
 

Anna K.

Final Flight
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Feb 22, 2014
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;) I guess the more you know about art, the less you can enjoy it so obviously it pays to stay as ignorant as possible. I often feel like that about figure skating and I might stick to this but handbags are too tempting –

There was one reason why the “art rules” discussion in previous page got derailed: basically, nothing that we can define as rules can wholly embrace the phenomenon. Some say it’s because of divine touch but I prefer to say it’s because of the complexity of image/phenomenon. Unlike the rules of a game that are agreed upon before the action starts, “rules of art” are time by time written by theorists post factum while the action has been on since the beginning of humanity and it’s simply impossible to cover the whole matter. Therefore, “rules” act like prejudices more often than not and that includes also rules that we have about our own likes/dislikes.

The handbag is actually a very good example. If you asked me, would you like a handbag with a photo print? I’d say a big NO because on my opinion it’s distasteful. Then, there’s Michelle’s handbag that features not only street lights but also a very famous predecessor:
http://ak2.polyvoreimg.com/cgi/img-thing/size/l/tid/71797407.jpg
and I realize that I like it and I like it better and would choose it instead of a classical real pearl use like this one:
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/ef/16/8e/ef168e7094ece06b749724a785f8ab67.jpg

So this is very, very tricky and taking school figures for an art was the easiest part. Today we want art and we want figure skating rules that would encourage more art but how to get it? Inventing more regulations may easily bring the opposite effect and so may returning to less-or-no regulations regarding the artistic part.
 
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