Quote There Will Be an Answer Let It Be Art Drawings
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Question of the Month
What is Fine art? and/or What is Beauty?
The following answers to this aesthetic 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 personal than that: information technology's nigh sharing the mode we experience the globe, which for many is an extension of personality. It is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot exist faithfully portrayed by words alone. And because words solitary are non plenty, we must find some other vehicle to behave our intent. But the content that we instill on or in our chosen media is not in itself the fine art. Art is to be establish in how the media is used, the way in which the content is expressed.
What then is beauty? Beauty is much more than cosmetic: it is not about prettiness. There are plenty of pretty pictures available at the neighborhood domicile furnishing store; but these we might not refer to every bit beautiful; and information technology is not difficult to find works of artistic expression that we might agree are beautiful that are non necessarily pretty. Beauty is rather a mensurate of affect, a measure out of emotion. In the context of art, beauty is the guess of successful communication between participants – the conveyance of a concept between the artist and the perceiver. Beautiful art is successful in portraying the artist's most profound intended emotions, the desired concepts, whether they be pretty and bright, or dark and sinister. Just neither the artist nor the observer tin be sure of successful communication in the end. So beauty in art is eternally subjective.
Wm. Joseph Nieters, Lake Ozark, Missouri
Works of art may arm-twist a sense of wonder or pessimism, hope or despair, adoration or spite; the piece of work of art may be directly or circuitous, subtle or explicit, intelligible or obscure; and the subjects and approaches to the creation of art are divisional merely by the imagination of the artist. Consequently, I believe that defining art based upon its content is a doomed enterprise.
Now a theme in aesthetics, the study of art, is the claim that there is a detachment or distance betwixt works of art and the flow of everyday life. Thus, works of art rise like islands from a electric current of more pragmatic concerns. When you stride out of a river and onto an isle, you've reached your destination. Similarly, the artful attitude requires you to treat artistic experience as an stop-in-itself: art asks us to go far empty of preconceptions and attend to the way in which nosotros experience the work of fine art. And although a person can have an 'aesthetic experience' of a natural scene, season or texture, art is dissimilar in that it is produced. Therefore, art is the intentional communication of an experience as an end-in-itself. The content of that feel in its cultural context may determine whether the artwork is popular or ridiculed, significant or niggling, but it is art either fashion.
1 of the initial reactions to this approach may be that it seems overly wide. An older brother who sneaks upwards behind his younger sibling and shouts "Booo!" tin can exist said to exist creating fine art. Simply isn't the divergence between this and a Freddy Krueger movie simply 1 of caste? On the other hand, my definition would exclude graphics used in ad or political propaganda, as they are created as a means to an end and non for their own sakes. Furthermore, 'communication' is not the all-time word for what I have in listen because it implies an unwarranted intention about the content represented. Aesthetic responses are often underdetermined past the artist'due south intentions.
Mike Mallory, Everett, WA
The fundamental difference between art and dazzler is that art is about who has produced information technology, whereas beauty depends on who's looking.
Of form there are standards of dazzler – that which is seen as 'traditionally' beautiful. The game changers – the square pegs, so to speak – are those who saw traditional standards of beauty and decided specifically to become against them, peradventure just to prove a point. Take Picasso, Munch, Schoenberg, to proper name but 3. They take fabricated a stand against these norms in their art. Otherwise their art is like all other art: its only office is to be experienced, appraised, and understood (or not).
Art is a means to land an stance or a feeling, or else to create a different view of the earth, whether it be inspired by the work of other people or something invented that's entirely new. Dazzler is any attribute of that or anything else that makes an individual feel positive or grateful. Beauty solitary is not art, but art can be made of, about or for beautiful things. Beauty can be institute in a snowy mount scene: art is the photo of information technology shown to family, the oil interpretation of it hung in a gallery, or the music score recreating the scene in crotchets and quavers.
However, fine art is non necessarily positive: it can be deliberately hurtful or displeasing: information technology tin can brand you recall virtually or consider things that you would rather not. But if information technology evokes an emotion in you, then it is art.
Chiara Leonardi, Reading, Berks
Art is a way of grasping the earth. Not only the concrete globe, which is what science attempts to do; but the whole world, and specifically, the human world, the world of society and spiritual feel.
Art emerged around 50,000 years ago, long before cities and civilization, yet in forms to which we can even so straight relate. The wall paintings in the Lascaux caves, which so startled Picasso, accept been carbon-dated at effectually 17,000 years sometime. At present, following the invention of photography and the devastating attack fabricated by Duchamp on the self-appointed Art Establishment [run into Brief Lives this issue], art cannot be simply divers on the basis of physical tests like 'fidelity of representation' or vague abstract concepts like 'beauty'. So how can nosotros ascertain art in terms applying to both cave-dwellers and modernistic metropolis sophisticates? To exercise this we need to ask: What does art do? And the respond is surely that it provokes an emotional, rather than a simply cognitive response. One style of approaching the problem of defining art, and then, could exist to say: Art consists of shareable ideas that have a shareable emotional affect. Art need not produce beautiful objects or events, since a bully piece of art could validly agitate emotions other than those aroused past dazzler, such every bit terror, anxiety, or laughter. However to derive an acceptable philosophical theory of fine art from this understanding means tackling the concept of 'emotion' head on, and philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to do this. But not all of them: Robert Solomon's book The Passions (1993) has made an excellent offset, and this seems to me to be the way to go.
It won't exist easy. Poor old Richard Rorty was jumped on from a very great peak when all he said was that literature, verse, patriotism, love and stuff like that were philosophically important. Art is vitally important to maintaining wide standards in civilisation. Its pedigree long predates philosophy, which is only 3,000 years onetime, and science, which is a mere 500 years sometime. Art deserves much more attending from philosophers.
Alistair MacFarlane, Gwynedd
Some years ago I went looking for art. To begin my journey I went to an fine art gallery. At that stage art to me was any I found in an art gallery. I institute paintings, more often than not, and because they were in the gallery I recognised them as fine art. A item Rothko painting was one colour and big. I observed a further piece that did not take an obvious label. It was too of one color – white – and gigantically large, occupying i complete wall of the very high and spacious room and continuing on minor roller wheels. On closer inspection I saw that information technology was a moveable wall, not a piece of art. Why could i piece of piece of work be considered 'art' and the other not?
The answer to the question could, perhaps, exist found in the criteria of Berys Gaut to decide if some artefact is, indeed, art – that art pieces function merely as pieces of art, just as their creators intended.
But were they beautiful? Did they evoke an emotional response in me? Beauty is frequently associated with art. There is sometimes an expectation of encountering a 'beautiful' object when going to run across a piece of work of art, be it painting, sculpture, book or performance. Of course, that expectation rapidly changes every bit ane widens the range of installations encountered. The classic example is Duchamp's Fountain (1917), a rather un-beautiful urinal.
Can we define dazzler? Permit me try by suggesting that beauty is the capacity of an artefact to evoke a pleasurable emotional response. This might be categorised every bit the 'similar' response.
I definitely did not like Fountain at the initial level of appreciation. There was skill, of course, in its construction. But what was the skill in its presentation as art?
So I began to attain a definition of art. A piece of work of art is that which asks a question which a non-art object such equally a wall does not: What am I? What am I communicating? The responses, both of the creator artist and of the recipient audience, vary, but they invariably involve a judgement, a response to the invitation to reply. The reply, too, goes towards deciphering that deeper question – the 'Who am I?' which goes towards defining humanity.
Neil Hallinan, Maynooth, Co. Kildare
'Art' is where we make meaning beyond language. Art consists in the making of pregnant through intelligent bureau, eliciting an aesthetic response. It'southward a means of advice where language is non sufficient to explain or depict its content. Art tin render visible and known what was previously unspoken. Because what fine art expresses and evokes is in part ineffable, we discover information technology hard to ascertain and delineate it. It is known through the feel of the audition as well as the intention and expression of the creative person. The significant is made by all the participants, and then can never exist fully known. It is multifarious and on-going. Even a disagreement is a tension which is itself an expression of something.
Art drives the development of a culture, both supporting the establishment and as well preventing destructive messages from being silenced – art leads, mirrors and reveals modify in politics and morality. Fine art plays a central office in the creation of culture, and is an outpouring of thought and ideas from it, and then it cannot exist fully understood in isolation from its context. Paradoxically, however, fine art can communicate beyond language and time, appealing to our common humanity and linking disparate communities. Perchance if wider audiences engaged with a greater diversity of the globe'southward artistic traditions information technology could engender increased tolerance and mutual respect.
Another inescapable facet of fine art is that it is a commodity. This fact feeds the creative procedure, whether motivating the artist to course an detail of monetary value, or to avert creating one, or to artistically commodify the aesthetic experience. The commodification of art also affects who is considered qualified to create art, annotate on it, and even define it, every bit those who benefit most strive to go along the value of 'art objects' loftier. These influences must feed into a culture'due south understanding of what art is at any fourth dimension, making thoughts about art culturally dependent. Notwithstanding, this commodification and the consequent closely-guarded role of the art critic also gives rise to a counter civilisation within art civilisation, often expressed through the creation of art that cannot be sold. The stratification of art by value and the resultant tension also adds to its significant, and the meaning of art to social club.
Catherine Bosley, Monk Soham, Suffolk
Start of all we must recognize the obvious. 'Fine art' is a word, and words and concepts are organic and change their pregnant through fourth dimension. So in the olden days, art meant arts and crafts. It was something you could excel at through practice and difficult piece of work. You lot learnt how to paint or sculpt, and you learnt the special symbolism of your era. Through Romanticism and the nativity of individualism, fine art came to mean originality. To do something new and never-heard-of defined the creative person. His or her personality became essentially as of import equally the artwork itself. During the era of Modernism, the search for originality led artists to reevaluate art. What could art do? What could it represent? Could you paint motility (Cubism, Futurism)? Could you lot pigment the non-cloth (Abstract Expressionism)? Fundamentally: could anything exist regarded as art? A mode of trying to solve this problem was to look across the piece of work itself, and focus on the art world: fine art was that which the establishment of art – artists, critics, art historians, etc – was prepared to regard as art, and which was made public through the institution, eastward.g. galleries. That'south Institutionalism – made famous through Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades.
Institutionalism has been the prevailing notion through the subsequently part of the twentieth century, at to the lowest degree in academia, and I would say information technology all the same holds a firm grip on our conceptions. 1 example is the Swedish creative person Anna Odell. Her film sequence Unknown woman 2009-349701, for which she faked psychosis to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, was widely debated, and past many was not regarded as art. But because it was debated by the art world, it succeeded in breaking into the art world, and is today regarded as art, and Odell is regarded an artist.
Of course there are those who try and break out of this hegemony, for example by refusing to play past the art world'due south unwritten rules. Andy Warhol with his Manufactory was one, even though he is today totally embraced past the art world. Another example is Damien Hirst, who, much similar Warhol, pays people to create the physical manifestations of his ideas. He doesn't use galleries and other art earth-approved arenas to advertise, and instead sells his objects directly to private individuals. This liberal arroyo to commercialism is one way of attacking the hegemony of the fine art world.
What does all this teach us virtually art? Probably that art is a fleeting and chimeric concept. Nosotros volition ever have art, just for the most part nosotros will only actually learn in retrospect what the fine art of our era was.
Tommy Törnsten, Linköping, Sweden
Art periods such as Classical, Byzantine, neo-Classical, Romantic, Mod and post-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 fine art. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), Arthur Danto claims a distinctiveness for fine art that inextricably links its instances with acts of ascertainment, without which all that could exist are 'material counterparts' or 'mere existent things' rather than artworks. Notwithstanding the competing theories, works of art tin be seen to possess 'family resemblances' or 'strands of resemblance' linking very different instances every bit fine art. Identifying instances of fine art is relatively straightforward, but 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 'Art' appears in general use in the nineteenth century, with 'Fine Art'; whereas 'art' has a history of previous applications, such as in music, poetry, comedy, tragedy and trip the light fantastic; and we should also mention literature, media arts, fifty-fifty gardening, which for David Cooper in A Philosophy of Gardens (2006) can provide "epiphanies of co-dependence". Fine art, then, is perhaps "anything presented for our aesthetic contemplation" – a phrase coined by John Davies, former tutor at the School of Art Education, 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 be art requires significance to fine art appreciators which endures as long as tokens or types of the artwork persist. Paradoxically, such significance is sometimes attributed to objects neither intended every bit fine art, nor especially intended to be perceived aesthetically – for instance, votive, devotional, commemorative or commonsensical artefacts. Furthermore, aesthetic interests can be eclipsed by dubious investment practices and social kudos. When combined with celebrity and harmful forms of narcissism, they can egregiously bear on artistic authenticity. These interests can be overriding, and spawn products masquerading as fine art. Then it'southward up to discerning observers to spot any Fads, Fakes and Fantasies (Sjoerd Hannema, 1970).
Colin Brookes, Loughborough, Leicestershire
For me art is nothing more than and nothing less than the artistic ability of individuals to limited their understanding of some attribute of private or public life, like love, conflict, fearfulness, or pain. Equally I read a war poem by Edward Thomas, enjoy a Mozart piano concerto, or contemplate a One thousand.C. Escher drawing, I am oft emotionally inspired by the moment and intellectually stimulated by the thought-procedure that follows. At this moment of discovery I humbly realize my views may be those shared past thousands, even millions across the world. This is due in large part to the mass media's ability to command and exploit our emotions. The commercial success of a performance or production becomes the metric by which art is now near exclusively gauged: quality in fine art has been sadly reduced to equating not bad art with sale of books, number of views, or the downloading of recordings. As well bad if personal sensibilities nigh a particular slice of art are lost in the greater rush for immediate acceptance.
So where does that go out the subjective notion that beauty can still be found in fine art? If beauty is the outcome of a process by which art gives pleasure to our senses, then it should remain a thing of personal discernment, even if exterior forces clamour to accept command of it. In other words, nobody, including the fine art critic, should be able to tell the private what is beautiful and what is not. The world of art is 1 of a constant tension betwixt preserving private tastes and promoting popular acceptance.
Ian Malcomson, Victoria, British Columbia
What we perceive as cute does not offend us on any level. It is a personal sentence, a subjective stance. A retentivity from once we gazed upon something beautiful, a sight ever so pleasing to the senses or to the heart, oft time stays with us forever. I shall never forget walking into Balzac'southward house in French republic: the aroma 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 feel it'due south important to argue why I think a flower, painting, sunset or how the calorie-free streaming through a stained-glass window is beautiful. The ability of the sights create an emotional reaction in me. I don't expect or business organization myself that others will agree with me or not. Tin all agree that an act of kindness is beautiful?
A thing of beauty is a whole; elements meeting making it so. A single brush stroke of a painting does not lonely create the impact of beauty, but all together, it becomes beautiful. A perfect bloom is beautiful, when all of the petals together form its perfection; a pleasant, intoxicating scent is also function of the beauty.
In thinking about the question, 'What is dazzler?', I've merely come up away with the idea that I am the beholder whose eye information technology is in. Suffice it to say, my private assessment of what strikes me as beautiful is all I demand to know.
Cheryl Anderson, Kenilworth, Illinois
Stendhal said, "Beauty is the promise of happiness", but this didn't get to the heart of the matter. Whose beauty are we talking about? Whose happiness?
Consider if a snake made art. What would it believe to be cute? What would information technology deign to make? Snakes have poor eyesight and find the world largely through a chemosensory organ, the Jacobson'due south organ, or through heat-sensing pits. Would a movie in its man grade even make sense to a snake? So their art, their dazzler, would be entirely alien to ours: it would not be visual, and even if they had songs they would exist foreign; afterward all, snakes do not have ears, they sense vibrations. So art would be sensed, and songs would be felt, if information technology is even possible to conceive that thought.
From this perspective – a view depression to the ground – we can run across that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. It may cross our lips to speak of the nature of beauty in billowy language, but we do so entirely with a forked tongue if we do so seriously. The aesthetics of representing dazzler ought not to fool the states into thinking beauty, as some abstract concept, truly exists. It requires a viewer and a context, and the value we place on certain combinations of colors or sounds over others speaks of zilch more preference. Our desire for pictures, moving or otherwise, is because our organs developed in such a way. A ophidian would have no utilize for the visual world.
I am thankful to take human art over snake fine art, but I would no incertitude 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 extreme thought is worthwhile: if snakes could write poetry, what would it exist?
Derek Halm, Portland, Oregon
[A: Sssibilance and sussssuration – Ed.]
The questions, 'What is fine art?' and 'What is beauty?' are different types and shouldn't exist conflated.
With boring predictability, nigh all contemporary discussers of art lapse into a 'relative-off', whereby they go to annoying lengths to demonstrate how open-minded they are and how ineluctably loose the concept of art is. If fine art is just whatever you want it to exist, can nosotros not just end the conversation in that location? Information technology'due south a done deal. I'll throw playdough on to a canvass, and we can pretend to brandish our modern credentials of acceptance and insight. This just doesn't work, and we all know it. If fine art is to mean anything, there has to be some working definition of what information technology is. If fine art tin be annihilation to anybody at someday, so in that location ends the discussion. What makes fine art special – and worth discussing – is that it stands higher up or outside everyday things, such as everyday nutrient, paintwork, or sounds. Art comprises special or infrequent dishes, paintings, and music.
So what, and then, is my definition of art? Briefly, I believe there must exist at least two considerations to label something as 'art'. The offset is that there must be something recognizable in the mode of 'author-to-audience reception'. I mean to say, in that location must be the recognition that something was made for an audience of some kind to receive, discuss or relish. Implicit in this point is the evident recognizability of what the fine art actually is – in other words, the author doesn't accept to tell yous it's fine art when you otherwise wouldn't have any thought. The 2nd indicate is merely the recognition of skill: some obvious skill has to be involved in making fine art. This, in my view, would be the minimum requirements – or definition – of art. Fifty-fifty if you disagree with the particulars, some definition is required to make annihilation at all fine art. Otherwise, what are nosotros even discussing? I'm breaking the mold and ask for brass tacks.
Brannon McConkey, Tennessee
Author of Student of Life: Why Becoming Engaged in Life, Art, and Philosophy Can Pb to a Happier Being
Human being beings appear to have a compulsion to categorize, to organize and define. We seek to impose order on a welter of sense-impressions and memories, seeing regularities and patterns in repetitions and associations, always on the lookout for correlations, eager to determine cause and effect, so that we might give sense to what might otherwise seem random and inconsequential. Even so, particularly in the last century, we accept also learned to take pleasance in the reflection of unstructured perceptions; our creative means of seeing and listening have expanded to comprehend disharmony and irregularity. This has meant that culturally, an e'er-widening gap has grown between the attitudes and opinions of the majority, who continue to define art in traditional ways, having to do with gild, harmony, representation; and the minority, who look for originality, who attempt to run into the globe anew, and strive for departure, and whose critical practice is rooted in abstraction. In between at that place are many who abjure both extremes, and who both find and requite pleasure both in defining a personal vision and in practising craftsmanship.
At that place will always be a claiming to traditional concepts of art from the shock of the new, and tensions around the appropriateness of our understanding. That is how things should be, as innovators button at the boundaries. At the same time, nosotros will continue to accept pleasance in the beauty of a mathematical equation, a finely-tuned machine, a successful scientific experiment, the technology of landing a probe on a comet, an accomplished poem, a striking portrait, the sound-world of a symphony. We apportion significance and meaning to what nosotros find of value and wish to share with our fellows. Our art and our definitions of beauty reflect our human being nature and the multiplicity of our creative efforts.
In the cease, because of our individuality and our varied histories and traditions, our debates will e'er exist inconclusive. If we are wise, we will wait and listen with an open spirit, and sometimes with a wry grinning, always celebrating the diversity of human imaginings and achievements.
David Howard, Church Stretton, Shropshire
Adjacent Question of the Month
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Source: https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/What_is_Art_and_or_What_is_Beauty
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