When the Artist Is as Beautiful as Her Art
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Question of the Month
What is Art? and/or What is Dazzler?
The following answers to this artful question each win a random book.
Art is something we exercise, a verb. Art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, but it is even more than personal than that: information technology's about sharing the way nosotros feel the globe, which for many is an extension of personality. It is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words alone. And because words lone are not enough, nosotros must find some other vehicle to carry our intent. But the content that we instill on or in our called media is non in itself the art. Art is to be found in how the media is used, the way in which the content is expressed.
What then is beauty? Beauty is much more cosmetic: it is not nearly prettiness. In that location are plenty of pretty pictures available at the neighborhood home furnishing store; just these we might not refer to as beautiful; and it is not difficult to notice works of artistic expression that nosotros might concur are beautiful that are not necessarily pretty. Beauty is rather a measure of affect, a mensurate of emotion. In the context of art, beauty is the guess of successful communication betwixt participants – the conveyance of a concept between the creative person and the perceiver. Cute art is successful in portraying the artist's almost profound intended emotions, the desired concepts, whether they be pretty and brilliant, or dark and sinister. Merely neither the artist nor the observer can be sure of successful communication in the cease. Then beauty in fine art is eternally subjective.
Wm. Joseph Nieters, Lake Ozark, Missouri
Works of art may elicit a sense of wonder or cynicism, hope or despair, adoration or spite; the work of art may be straight or complex, subtle or explicit, intelligible or obscure; and the subjects and approaches to the creation of art are divisional only past the imagination of the creative person. Consequently, I believe that defining art based upon its content is a doomed enterprise.
Now a theme in aesthetics, the written report of art, is the claim that there is a disengagement or distance betwixt works of fine art and the flow of everyday life. Thus, works of art ascent like islands from a electric current of more pragmatic concerns. When yous step out of a river and onto an isle, you've reached your destination. Similarly, the aesthetic attitude requires you to treat artistic feel as an stop-in-itself: art asks us to make it empty of preconceptions and attend to the way in which we experience the work of art. And although a person can have an 'artful feel' of a natural scene, flavor or texture, art is different in that information technology is produced. Therefore, art is the intentional advice of an experience as an cease-in-itself. The content of that experience in its cultural context may determine whether the artwork is pop or ridiculed, meaning or little, but information technology is art either way.
One of the initial reactions to this approach may be that it seems overly wide. An older brother who sneaks up behind his younger sibling and shouts "Booo!" can be said to exist creating fine art. But isn't the difference between this and a Freddy Krueger movie but 1 of degree? On the other hand, my definition would exclude graphics used in advertising or political propaganda, as they are created equally a means to an terminate and not for their own sakes. Furthermore, 'communication' is non the all-time word for what I have in mind because information technology implies an unwarranted intention about the content represented. Aesthetic responses are often underdetermined by the artist'due south intentions.
Mike Mallory, Everett, WA
The fundamental departure between art and beauty is that art is about who has produced it, whereas beauty depends on who's looking.
Of form at that place are standards of beauty – that which is seen as 'traditionally' beautiful. The game changers – the foursquare pegs, and so to speak – are those who saw traditional standards of beauty and decided specifically to go against them, perhaps just to prove a betoken. Take Picasso, Munch, Schoenberg, to proper name only three. They take made a stand up against these norms in their art. Otherwise their art is like all other fine art: its merely part is to exist experienced, appraised, and understood (or not).
Art is a means to land an opinion or a feeling, or else to create a unlike view of the globe, whether information technology be inspired past the work of other people or something invented that's entirely new. Beauty is whatever aspect of that or anything else that makes an private experience positive or grateful. Dazzler alone is not art, but fine art can be made of, virtually or for beautiful things. Dazzler can exist establish in a snowy mountain scene: art is the photo of it shown to family, the oil estimation of it hung in a gallery, or the music score recreating the scene in crotchets and quavers.
All the same, art is not necessarily positive: it can exist deliberately hurtful or displeasing: information technology can brand y'all think about or consider things that you would rather not. Merely if it evokes an emotion in you lot, then information technology is fine art.
Chiara Leonardi, Reading, Berks
Art is a mode of grasping the world. Not simply the physical earth, which is what science attempts to do; but the whole world, and specifically, the human world, the world of society and spiritual experience.
Fine art emerged around 50,000 years agone, long before cities and civilisation, yet in forms to which nosotros can however directly relate. The wall paintings in the Lascaux caves, which and so startled Picasso, have been carbon-dated at around 17,000 years old. At present, post-obit the invention of photography and the devastating attack made by Duchamp on the self-appointed Fine art Institution [meet Brief Lives this issue], fine art cannot exist simply divers on the basis of physical tests like 'fidelity of representation' or vague abstruse concepts like 'beauty'. So how can we define art in terms applying to both cave-dwellers and modern city sophisticates? To do this nosotros need to ask: What does art practise? And the reply is surely that it provokes an emotional, rather than a simply cognitive response. One way of budgeted the trouble of defining art, then, could be to say: Fine art consists of shareable ideas that have a shareable emotional impact. Fine art need non produce beautiful objects or events, since a not bad piece of art could validly arouse emotions other than those aroused by beauty, such as terror, anxiety, or laughter. Yet to derive an acceptable philosophical theory of art from this understanding means tackling the concept of 'emotion' head on, and philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to do this. Merely not all of them: Robert Solomon's book The Passions (1993) has made an excellent start, and this seems to me to exist the style to go.
It won't be easy. Poor old Richard Rorty was jumped on from a very great peak when all he said was that literature, poetry, patriotism, dearest and stuff like that were philosophically important. Art is vitally important to maintaining wide standards in civilization. Its pedigree long predates philosophy, which is only 3,000 years old, and science, which is a mere 500 years old. Fine art deserves much more attention from philosophers.
Alistair MacFarlane, Gwynedd
Some years ago I went looking for fine art. To brainstorm my journey I went to an art gallery. At that phase art to me was whatever I found in an fine art gallery. I found paintings, by and large, and because they were in the gallery I recognised them as art. A particular Rothko painting was i colour and large. I observed a farther piece that did not have an obvious label. It was likewise of 1 color – white – and gigantically big, occupying one consummate wall of the very high and spacious room and standing on pocket-sized roller wheels. On closer inspection I saw that it was a moveable wall, not a slice of fine art. Why could one piece of work be considered 'art' and the other not?
The reply to the question could, peradventure, be found in the criteria of Berys Gaut to make up one's mind if some artefact is, indeed, art – that art pieces function only equally pieces of art, just as their creators intended.
Merely were they cute? Did they evoke an emotional response in me? Dazzler is frequently associated with fine art. At that place is sometimes an expectation of encountering a 'beautiful' object when going to see a piece of work of art, be it painting, sculpture, book or functioning. Of form, that expectation quickly changes as one widens the range of installations encountered. The classic example is Duchamp's Fountain (1917), a rather un-beautiful urinal.
Can we define beauty? Let me attempt by suggesting that beauty is the capacity of an artefact to evoke a pleasurable emotional response. This might be categorised as the 'like' response.
I definitely did not like Fountain at the initial level of appreciation. There was skill, of form, in its construction. But what was the skill in its presentation as art?
So I began to reach a definition of fine art. A work of art is that which asks a question which a non-fine art object such as a wall does not: What am I? What am I communicating? The responses, both of the creator artist and of the recipient audience, vary, simply they invariably involve a sentence, a response to the invitation to reply. The answer, too, goes towards deciphering that deeper question – the 'Who am I?' which goes towards defining humanity.
Neil Hallinan, Maynooth, Co. Kildare
'Art' is where nosotros brand meaning beyond linguistic communication. Art consists in the making of pregnant through intelligent agency, eliciting an aesthetic response. It's a means of communication where language is not sufficient to explain or describe its content. Fine art tin can render visible and known what was previously unspoken. Considering what art expresses and evokes is in office ineffable, we find it hard to define and delineate it. Information technology is known through the feel of the audition likewise as the intention and expression of the artist. The meaning is fabricated by all the participants, and and then can never be fully known. It is multifarious and on-going. Fifty-fifty a disagreement is a tension which is itself an expression of something.
Art drives the development of a civilisation, both supporting the institution and likewise preventing destructive letters from being silenced – fine art leads, mirrors and reveals change in politics and morality. Art plays a central part in the cosmos of civilisation, and is an outpouring of thought and ideas from it, and then it cannot be fully understood in isolation from its context. Paradoxically, even so, art can communicate across language and fourth dimension, appealing to our common humanity and linking disparate communities. Possibly if wider audiences engaged with a greater variety of the world'southward artistic traditions information technology could engender increased tolerance and mutual respect.
Another inescapable facet of art is that it is a commodity. This fact feeds the creative process, whether motivating the artist to class an item of monetary value, or to avert creating ane, or to artistically commodify the aesthetic experience. The commodification of art also affects who is considered qualified to create art, comment on it, and even define it, as those who benefit most strive to proceed the value of 'art objects' high. These influences must feed into a civilisation's agreement of what art is at any fourth dimension, making thoughts nearly art culturally dependent. However, this commodification and the consequent closely-guarded part of the art critic too gives rise to a counter culture within art culture, oft expressed through the creation of fine art that cannot be sold. The stratification of art by value and the resultant tension also adds to its meaning, and the significant of art to society.
Catherine Bosley, Monk Soham, Suffolk
Start of all nosotros must recognize the obvious. 'Fine art' is a discussion, and words and concepts are organic and change their meaning through time. So in the olden days, art meant craft. Information technology was something you could excel at through practise and hard work. You learnt how to paint or sculpt, and y'all learnt the special symbolism of your era. Through Romanticism and the birth of individualism, fine art came to mean originality. To do something new and never-heard-of defined the artist. His or her personality became substantially equally important as the artwork itself. During the era of Modernism, the search for originality led artists to reevaluate art. What could fine art practise? What could it stand for? Could you paint movement (Cubism, Futurism)? Could you paint the non-material (Abstract Expressionism)? Fundamentally: could annihilation be regarded every bit art? A way of trying to solve this trouble was to expect beyond the work itself, and focus on the art world: fine art was that which the institution of art – artists, critics, fine art historians, etc – was prepared to regard as art, and which was made public through the establishment, e.g. galleries. That's Institutionalism – made famous through Marcel Duchamp's set-mades.
Institutionalism has been the prevailing notion through the afterwards part of the twentieth century, at least in academia, and I would say it still holds a firm grip on our conceptions. Ane instance is the Swedish artist Anna Odell. Her motion picture sequence Unknown adult female 2009-349701, for which she faked psychosis to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, was widely debated, and by many was not regarded as fine art. Only because it was debated by the art earth, it succeeded in breaking into the art earth, and is today regarded as art, and Odell is regarded an artist.
Of form there are those who try and break out of this hegemony, for case past refusing to play past the art world's unwritten rules. Andy Warhol with his Manufactory was one, even though he is today totally embraced by the art world. Another example is Damien Hirst, who, much like Warhol, pays people to create the physical manifestations of his ideas. He doesn't use galleries and other fine art world-approved arenas to advertise, and instead sells his objects directly to individual individuals. This liberal approach to capitalism is one way of attacking the hegemony of the art world.
What does all this teach united states most art? Probably that art is a fleeting and chimeric concept. Nosotros volition always have art, only for the most part we will just really learn in retrospect what the art of our era was.
Tommy Törnsten, Linköping, Sweden
Fine art periods such as Classical, Byzantine, neo-Classical, Romantic, Mod and mail-Modern reflect the changing nature of art in social and cultural contexts; and shifting values are evident in varying content, forms and styles. These changes are encompassed, more or less in sequence, by Imitationalist, Emotionalist, Expressivist, Formalist and Institutionalist theories of art. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), Arthur Danto claims a distinctiveness for fine art that inextricably links its instances with acts of observation, without which all that could exist are 'material counterparts' or 'mere existent things' rather than artworks. Notwithstanding the competing theories, works of art can be seen to possess 'family resemblances' or 'strands of resemblance' linking very unlike instances as fine art. Identifying instances of fine art is relatively straightforward, just a definition of art that includes all possible cases is elusive. Consequently, fine art has been claimed to be an 'open' concept.
According to Raymond Williams' Keywords (1976), capitalised 'Fine art' appears in general use in the nineteenth century, with 'Art'; whereas 'fine art' has a history of previous applications, such equally in music, poetry, one-act, tragedy and trip the light fantastic toe; and we should also mention literature, media arts, even gardening, which for David Cooper in A Philosophy of Gardens (2006) can provide "epiphanies of co-dependence". Art, then, is perhaps "anything presented for our aesthetic contemplation" – a phrase coined by John Davies, onetime tutor at the School of Art Teaching, Birmingham, in 1971 – although 'anything' may seem likewise inclusive. Gaining our aesthetic interest is at to the lowest degree a necessary requirement of fine art. Sufficiency for something to exist fine art requires significance to art appreciators which endures every bit long every bit tokens or types of the artwork persist. Paradoxically, such significance is sometimes attributed to objects neither intended as art, nor especially intended to exist perceived aesthetically – for instance, votive, devotional, commemorative or utilitarian artefacts. Furthermore, artful interests can be eclipsed by dubious investment practices and social kudos. When combined with celebrity and harmful forms of narcissism, they can egregiously touch on artistic authenticity. These interests tin can be overriding, and spawn products masquerading as art. And so information technology's up to discerning observers to spot whatsoever Fads, Fakes and Fantasies (Sjoerd Hannema, 1970).
Colin Brookes, Loughborough, Leicestershire
For me art is goose egg more and zero less than the artistic power of individuals to express their understanding of some aspect of private or public life, like dearest, conflict, fearfulness, or hurting. Equally I read a state of war poem by Edward Thomas, relish a Mozart piano concerto, or contemplate a M.C. Escher drawing, I am often emotionally inspired by the moment and intellectually stimulated by the idea-process that follows. At this moment of discovery I humbly realize my views may be those shared by thousands, fifty-fifty millions across the globe. This is due in large part to the mass media's power to control and exploit our emotions. The commercial success of a performance or product becomes the metric by which art is now almost exclusively gauged: quality in fine art has been sadly reduced to equating great fine art with sale of books, number of views, or the downloading of recordings. Too bad if personal sensibilities almost a particular piece of fine art are lost in the greater rush for immediate acceptance.
So where does that get out the subjective notion that beauty can still exist found in art? If beauty is the outcome of a process by which fine art gives pleasure to our senses, and then it should remain a matter of personal discernment, even if outside forces clamour to take control of it. In other words, nobody, including the art critic, should exist able to tell the individual what is beautiful and what is non. The earth of art is 1 of a abiding tension betwixt preserving individual tastes and promoting popular acceptance.
Ian Malcomson, Victoria, British Columbia
What we perceive as beautiful does not offend usa on any level. It is a personal judgement, a subjective opinion. A memory from once we gazed upon something cute, a sight e'er so pleasing to the senses or to the eye, oft time stays with the states forever. I shall never forget walking into Balzac's house in France: the smell of lilies was so overwhelming that I had a numinous moment. The intensity of the emotion evoked may not be possible to explain. I don't experience information technology's important to debate why I think a bloom, painting, dusk or how the light streaming through a stained-drinking glass window is beautiful. The ability of the sights create an emotional reaction in me. I don't look or concern myself that others will agree with me or not. Can all concord that an deed of kindness is beautiful?
A thing of dazzler is a whole; elements coming together making it then. A single brush stroke of a painting does not alone create the affect of beauty, but all together, it becomes beautiful. A perfect flower is beautiful, when all of the petals together form its perfection; a pleasant, intoxicating odour is besides part of the beauty.
In thinking virtually the question, 'What is beauty?', I've but come away with the idea that I am the beholder whose center information technology is in. Suffice information technology to say, my private assessment of what strikes me as cute is all I need to know.
Cheryl Anderson, Kenilworth, Illinois
Stendhal said, "Beauty is the promise of happiness", but this didn't get to the center of the matter. Whose beauty are we talking most? Whose happiness?
Consider if a snake fabricated art. What would information technology believe to be beautiful? What would it deign to make? Snakes have poor eyesight and detect the earth largely through a chemosensory organ, the Jacobson'due south organ, or through heat-sensing pits. Would a movie in its human form even make sense to a snake? Then their art, their beauty, would be entirely conflicting to ours: it would not be visual, and even if they had songs they would be strange; afterward all, snakes do not have ears, they sense vibrations. Then fine art would be sensed, and songs would exist felt, if it is even possible to conceive that idea.
From this perspective – a view depression to the basis – we can see that dazzler is truly in the heart of the beholder. Information technology may cross our lips to speak of the nature of dazzler in billowy language, simply we practice so entirely with a forked tongue if we do so seriously. The aesthetics of representing beauty ought not to fool u.s.a. into thinking beauty, as some abstract concept, truly exists. It requires a viewer and a context, and the value we place on sure combinations of colors or sounds over others speaks of null more than preference. Our desire for pictures, moving or otherwise, is because our organs developed in such a way. A snake would have no use for the visual world.
I am thankful to have human art over snake fine art, but I would no doubt be amazed at serpentine fine art. It would require an intellectual sloughing of many conceptions we take for granted. For that, considering the possibility of this farthermost thought is worthwhile: if snakes could write poesy, what would it be?
Derek Halm, Portland, Oregon
[A: Sssibilance and sussssuration – Ed.]
The questions, 'What is art?' and 'What is beauty?' are different types and shouldn't be conflated.
With boring predictability, most all contemporary discussers of fine art lapse into a 'relative-off', whereby they go to abrasive lengths to demonstrate how open-minded they are and how ineluctably loose the concept of art is. If art is but whatsoever you want it to be, tin can we not merely end the conversation there? It's a done deal. I'll throw playdough on to a sheet, and we can pretend to display our modern credentials of credence and insight. This but doesn't work, and nosotros all know information technology. If art is to mean anything, in that location has to be some working definition of what information technology is. If art can be annihilation to anybody at anytime, and then there ends the discussion. What makes fine art special – and worth discussing – is that information technology stands above or outside everyday things, such as everyday food, paintwork, or sounds. Art comprises special or exceptional dishes, paintings, and music.
So what, so, is my definition of fine art? Briefly, I believe in that location must be at least two considerations to characterization something equally 'fine art'. The first is that at that place must exist something recognizable in the way of 'author-to-audition reception'. I mean to say, there must be the recognition that something was fabricated for an audience of some kind to receive, discuss or enjoy. Implicit in this point is the evident recognizability of what the art actually is – in other words, the author doesn't have to tell you information technology'south fine art when you otherwise wouldn't have whatever idea. The 2nd bespeak is only the recognition of skill: some obvious skill has to be involved in making art. This, in my view, would be the minimum requirements – or definition – of fine art. Even if you disagree with the particulars, some definition is required to brand annihilation at all art. Otherwise, what are nosotros even discussing? I'g breaking the mold and inquire for brass tacks.
Brannon McConkey, Tennessee
Author of Pupil of Life: Why Becoming Engaged in Life, Art, and Philosophy Tin can Lead to a Happier Existence
Homo beings appear to have a coercion to categorize, to organize and define. Nosotros seek to impose club on a welter of sense-impressions and memories, seeing regularities and patterns in repetitions and associations, ever on the lookout for correlations, eager to decide cause and issue, and then that we might requite sense to what might otherwise seem random and inconsequential. All the same, particularly in the last century, nosotros have too learned to take pleasure in the reflection of unstructured perceptions; our artistic ways of seeing and listening take expanded to encompass disharmony and irregularity. This has meant that culturally, an ever-widening gap has grown between the attitudes and opinions of the majority, who go along to define art in traditional ways, having to exercise with order, harmony, representation; and the minority, who look for originality, who try to see the world anew, and strive for difference, and whose critical practice is rooted in abstraction. In between in that location are many who abjure both extremes, and who both find and give pleasance both in defining a personal vision and in practising adroitness.
There will always be a challenge to traditional concepts of art from the shock of the new, and tensions around the appropriateness of our agreement. That is how things should be, as innovators push at the boundaries. At the same time, we will continue to take pleasure in the beauty of a mathematical equation, a finely-tuned automobile, a successful scientific experiment, the technology of landing a probe on a comet, an accomplished verse form, a striking portrait, the sound-globe of a symphony. We apportion significance and significant to what we detect of value and wish to share with our fellows. Our art and our definitions of dazzler reverberate our man nature and the multiplicity of our artistic efforts.
In the finish, considering of our individuality and our varied histories and traditions, our debates will always be inconclusive. If we are wise, we will expect and heed with an open spirit, and sometimes with a wry smiling, ever celebrating the diversity of human imaginings and achievements.
David Howard, Church Stretton, Shropshire
Next Question of the Calendar month
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Source: https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/What_is_Art_and_or_What_is_Beauty
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