Wednesday 6 May 2015
What (and HOW) is (Fine and Applied) Art (and craft)?
What and How is (applied and FINE) "art" (and Craft?)? Artist and Artisan.
Harmony of colors
How best to define the term "art" is a subject of constant contention; many books and
journal articles have been published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by
the term "art". Theodor Adorno claimed in 1969 "It is self-evident that nothing concerning
art is self-evident."Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and programmers
all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational definitions that
vary considerably. Furthermore, it is clear that even the basic meaning of the term "art"
has changed several times over the centuries, and has continued to evolve during the
\20th century as well.
The main recent sense of the word "art" is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art
or "fine art." Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist's creativity, or
to engage the audience's aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards
consideration of the "finer" things. Often, if the skill is being used in a functional
object, people will consider it a craft instead of art, a suggestion which is highly
disputed by many Contemporary Craft thinkers. Likewise, if the skill is being used
in a commercial or industrial way it may be considered design instead of art, or
contrariwise these may be defended as art forms, perhaps called applied art. Some
thinkers, for instance, have argued that the difference between fine art and applied
art has more to do with the actual function of the object than any clear definitional
difference. Art usually implies no function other than to convey or communicate
an idea.
Even as late as 1912 it was normal in the West to assume that all art aims at beauty
, and thus that anything that wasn't trying to be beautiful couldn't count as art.
The cubists, dadaists, Stravinsky, and many later art movements struggled against
this conception that beauty was central to the definition of art, with such success
that, according to Danto, "Beauty had disappeared not only from the advanced art
of the 1960's but from the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."
Perhaps some notion like "expression" (in Croce's theories) or "counter-environment"
(in McLuhan's theory) can replace the previous role of beauty. Brian Massumi brought
back "beauty" into consideration together with "expression".
Another view, as important to the philosophy of art as "beauty," is that of the "sublime,"
elaborated upon in the twentieth century by the postmodern philosopher Jean-François
Lyotard. A further approach, elaborated by André Malraux in works such as The Voices of
Silence, is that art is fundamentally a response to a metaphysical question ('Art', he
writes, 'is an 'anti-destiny'). Malraux argues that, while art has sometimes been oriented
towards beauty and the sublime (principally in post-Renaissance European art) these
qualities, as the wider history of art demonstrates, are by no means essential to it.
Perhaps (as in Kennick's theory) no definition of art is possible anymore. Perhaps art
should be thought of as a cluster of related concepts (family resemblance of notions)
in a Wittgensteinian fashion (as in Weitz or Beuys). Another approach is to say that
"art" is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums and
artists define as art is considered art regardless of formal definitions. This "institutional
definition of art" (see also Institutional Critique) has been championed by George Dickie.
Most people did not consider the depiction of a store-bought urinal or Brillo Box to be ar
t until Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol (respectively) placed them in the context of
art (i.e., the art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the
associations that define art.
Proceduralists often suggest that it is the process by which a work of art is created or
viewed that makes it art, not any inherent feature of an object, or how well received
it is by the institutions of the art world after its introduction to society at large. If a
poet writes down several lines, intending them as a poem, the very procedure by
which it is written makes it a poem. Whereas if a journalist writes exactly the same
set of words, intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article
later, these would not be a poem. Leo Tolstoy, on the other hand, claims in his
What is art? (1897) that what decides whether or not something is art is how it is
experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator. Functionalists like
Monroe Beardsley argue that whether or not a piece counts as art depends on what
function it plays in a particular context; the same Greek vase may play a non-artistic
function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function in another context
(helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure). '
Marxist attempts to define art focus on its place in the mode of production, such as
in Walter Benjamin's essay The Author as Producer,[82] and/or its political role in
class struggle. Revising some concepts of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser,
Gary Tedman defines art in terms of social reproduction of the relations of
production on the aesthetic level.
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