What is art?
Hello to all, been a while since I posted here, but I thought I'd drop in and was reading when the following thesis came to me. Hardly original, but then what on the internets is?
Anyway, here is my thesis:
Q: What is art?
A: Art is any contrived sensory experience which evokes an emotional response.
Too broad? Too Narrow? Patently absurb? An interesting, but deranged viewpoint? I welcome any and all criticism, critiques, requests for clarification and general discussion on the topic.
Possibly too broad. I can contrive to yell at your face to get an emotional response of fear, anger, etc.
I think it needs to be added that it must be a contrived piece of work that can act independently of the creator.
uh hang on i thought this was part of the other thread... should i combine them? i will follow the will of the people on this (and i'll clean everything up afterwards of course)
I'd appreciate if you could keep it seperate, only because I'd like to use this thread and the discussion to clarify my definition. And the other thread has a kind of different point and life of it's own.
the questions are, for this thread and that, respectively, What defines art? and What is art?
I fail to see a meaningful distinction between the two, and you have 24 hours to prove me wrong
then i will be all 'gwahir, buddy old pal, wanna do my mod work for me thanks pal' and maybe even hugs
I think it's probably correct to say the definition is too broad in a certain sense, but I think the distinction you are making is part of the definition of the word contrive.Originally Posted by gwahir
In the example you give, the experience is not contrived if you do so because you are genuinely angry or upset.
Perhaps there needs to be a consideration of intent to be emotionally responsive by the viewer?
I disagree as to the questions being asked.
The OP in the other thread, seems to specifically focusing on what is postmodernism, and and whether it fits the definition of art.
Although they are also asking the question of what is art, this is only in a peripheral sense, in that doing so is necessary to determine whether post-modernism is art or not.I am talking specifically about the postmodern works and if they can truly be called "artistic".
Hence in any definition of art they conclude (thread-wise) is correct, they may actually choose one that ignores any or all of a whole range of other types of arguably legitimate forms of art, because it's not necessary to agree upon those to make a definition that includes or excludes the one particular form in question (i.e. post-modernism)
My intent on the contrary is to discern a definition which is an all-encompassing definition of what art is, which is capable of including within it's definition all recognizable forms of art (although obviously this will always be open to a measure of debate over some controversial forms) and excluding those with are not.
It is therefore my assertion that the intent, content and conclusions of both threads will be demonstrably (if you allow it) quite different. Also, his thread is predicated on drunken gibber, mine is sober gibberish.
art is a process or outcome of deliberate work that results in something which is appealing. This is not exclusive appeal or universal appeal, ANY appeal will do.
Aesthetics deals with the nature of beauty, so finding beauty in something can make it art.
If this is the case, absolutly everything COULD BE art. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and therefore so is the art.
YO HO YO HO
ceci n'est pas une signature
I think that intrinsic to the nature of art is that it is displayed. A deep thing/event/perception is just that, but when it's meant to have an audience, even if the audience is just the one who created it (which is admittedly stretching it), then it's art.
The graphical representation of what the artist sees.
What a Socratic thread. I'm going to go all Wittgenstein on you all and say that "Art" is not delineated by a definitional "essence" of some kind. Like the concept of a "game", things collected together as "Art" bear only a family resemblance to each other (i.e. one is connected to another which is in turn similar to another) so that they don't all share one trait but rather each shares a trait with some of the others, and consequently that art is a contingent rather than an essential category, determined by culture and by reciprocal reference.
In terms of the actual relations between pieces I would go with Levi-Strauss style structuralism and argue that each art piece is related to previous ones by inversion and interplay of themes that ultimately derives from the structure of human thought.
To prevent this descending into total nihilistic postmodern contingency, though, I would add as a footnote that art is ultimately an invocation of the sublime, revolving around but never touching the Real (i.e. the Zizekian view of Art, where the Kantian Sublime is a sublimated reference to the Lacanian Real)
God I'm cool
EDIT: Apparently Morris Weitz already used Family Resemblance as a theory of art
He gets to be in my club of awesome
Last edited by Think; 01-16-2010 at 10:02 AM.
Isn't the aforementioned invocation of the sublime itself the essence then? Or if not that, then the "family resemblance" to other pieces of art? The essence of X is that which is necessary to X, so to define art in any certain (necessary) terms is to name its essence.
I think the family resemblance description only works if you have a fairly "commonsense" or narrow view of what art can be (or what can be art). The one I buy into is pretty wide, so I think it needs to have an essence in order to save it from collapsing into nonsensical inclusiveness. I think the invocation of the sublime doesn't quite work anymore, as art and the response to art has changed. If you do want to hold onto it, then I think the discussion needs to modernise itself to be relevant.
I don't mean if I am genuinely angry or upset -- I mean if I am contriving to make you feel upset or scared by yelling at you.
As for the second bit, is art not art if nobody wants to be emotionally unresponsive to it?
Well, I would argue in this case, that's avoided, and I'll explicate in order to demonstrate why. In the Zizekian corpus, the Real refers to that which avoids being conceptualised, made meaningful or represented in the Symbolic and Imaginary orders (i.e. words or conceptual schemes in the case of the Symbolic, images in the case of the Imaginary.). The Real, then, is the thing experienced by the pre-lingual subject, it is what a toothbrush is before you can name it toothbrush, explain what it is used for, link it to other toothbrushes etc. The Real is experienced in adult life when you cannot explain or systematise an experience, and, to Zizek, in it's inverted form when you use a word which has no meaning, refers to nothing, or has an infinite, transcendent, or surplus meaning (which is actually the same thing in this theory) (for Zizek, words like "God", "My Country", "The Soul" and so on, called "signifiers without signifieds"). For Zizek, then, Religious, aesthetic, patriotic feelings exploit the Human experience of the Real, and so, ironically, they actually do point "beyond" all human comprehension and experience (Whether this is inherently atheist is another debate). Art is an experience of the Real in that it defies all meaning by having a surplus of it, cannot in fact actually refer to anything ("What is she smiling at?"), and so is ultimately a "signifier without signified". I would argue that since the Real is not limited to Art but rather Art is simply one socially prescribed channel of the Real, the Real cannot be called the "essence" of art; and since Zizek uses the word "sublime" simply to identify the Kantian sublime with this particular channel of the Real, he is not using the word "sublime" essentially but only definitionally. Hence I can ascribe to it a culturally contingent existence using family resemblance theory and Structuralism without logical contradiction (because the Real is an ontological category, Art merely a contingent channel of this).
EDIT: I realised that "essentially but only definitionally" is far from lucid. What I should say is that when Kant uses the word sublime, insofar as it has a definite meaning, it is merely tautological. "Art is the Sublime" means only that art is art. Insofar as it says anything more, as it does, I think that we would agree that the sublime means "beyond, transcendent". Naturally, in this view, when Sublime means that it is a textbook example of a signifier without signified. "Sublime" therefore does not define what art does, but explicates it by performing the same function as art i.e. Pointing out and attempting to accommodate into the symbolic and imaginary orders the existence of the Real.
As far as the "family resemblance as essence" thing goes, I think that's stretching the definition of essence. Surely "essence" must be "that which is shared by all members of the group and not with things outside the group"; if this is the case, then family resemblance theory is precisely anti-essentialist because it denies that all members of the group share the same thing. To say that the family resemblance is itself the essence fails because family resemblance is a phenomenon in other systems like games; to say that "family resemblance to other pieces of art" is the essence doesn't work either because it utilises the concept of "art" in the definition of "art", hence already admitting that art pre-exists any formulation of it's essence and therefore is contingent rather than essential.
Last edited by Think; 01-17-2010 at 07:49 PM.
Excludes living art, in which the artist's presentation and the work itself are inextricably linked.
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