What Is Art? How Would You Describe a Good Piece of Art? What Is Art?
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Question of the Month
What is Art? and/or What is Beauty?
The following answers to this artful question each win a random book.
Art is something we practise, a verb. Fine art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, merely information technology is even more personal than that: it's near sharing the way we experience the world, which for many is an extension of personality. Information technology is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words solitary. And because words lonely are non enough, we must find some other vehicle to carry our intent. But the content that we instill on or in our chosen media is not in itself the art. Art is to exist found in how the media is used, the way in which the content is expressed.
What then is beauty? Beauty is much more than corrective: information technology is not nearly prettiness. There are plenty of pretty pictures available at the neighborhood habitation furnishing store; just these we might not refer to every bit cute; and it is non 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 estimate of successful advice between participants – the conveyance of a concept betwixt the creative person and the perceiver. Beautiful 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 exist sure of successful advice in the terminate. Then dazzler in art is eternally subjective.
Wm. Joseph Nieters, Lake Ozark, Missouri
Works of fine art may arm-twist a sense of wonder or cynicism, hope or despair, adoration or spite; the piece of work of art may be directly or complex, subtle or explicit, intelligible or obscure; and the subjects and approaches to the creation of fine art are divisional simply by 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 study of fine art, is the claim that there is a detachment or distance betwixt works of art and the flow of everyday life. Thus, works of fine art rise like islands from a electric current of more businesslike concerns. When y'all step out of a river and onto an island, yous've reached your destination. Similarly, the aesthetic attitude requires you lot to treat artistic experience as an stop-in-itself: art asks us to arrive empty of preconceptions and attend to the way in which we feel the work of art. And although a person can have an 'aesthetic experience' of a natural scene, season or texture, art is different in that it is produced. Therefore, fine art is the intentional communication of an experience as an end-in-itself. The content of that experience in its cultural context may determine whether the artwork is popular or ridiculed, significant or lilliputian, but it is art either way.
1 of the initial reactions to this arroyo may be that it seems overly broad. An older brother who sneaks upwards behind his younger sibling and shouts "Booo!" tin can exist said to be creating art. Simply isn't the difference between this and a Freddy Krueger picture just i of degree? On the other hand, my definition would exclude graphics used in advertisement or political propaganda, as they are created as a means to an terminate and not for their own sakes. Furthermore, 'advice' is not the all-time give-and-take for what I have in listen because information technology implies an unwarranted intention about the content represented. Aesthetic responses are oftentimes underdetermined past the artist'due south intentions.
Mike Mallory, Everett, WA
The primal difference between art and beauty is that fine art is virtually who has produced information technology, whereas beauty depends on who's looking.
Of course there are standards of beauty – 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 go against them, perhaps merely to prove a betoken. Take Picasso, Munch, Schoenberg, to name simply three. They have fabricated a stand up confronting these norms in their art. Otherwise their art is like all other art: its just part is to be experienced, appraised, and understood (or non).
Art is a ways to country an opinion or a feeling, or else to create a different view of the world, whether information technology be inspired by the work of other people or something invented that's entirely new. Beauty is whatsoever aspect of that or anything else that makes an private feel positive or grateful. Beauty alone is not art, just art tin can be made of, nigh or for beautiful things. Beauty can be found in a snowy mountain scene: art is the photograph of it shown to family unit, the oil interpretation of it hung in a gallery, or the music score recreating the scene in crotchets and quavers.
Even so, art is not necessarily positive: it can be deliberately hurtful or displeasing: information technology tin can brand you lot call back about or consider things that you would rather not. But if it evokes an emotion in y'all, then it is fine art.
Chiara Leonardi, Reading, Berks
Art is a manner of grasping the earth. Not merely the concrete world, which is what scientific discipline attempts to do; but the whole earth, and specifically, the human being world, the world of society and spiritual feel.
Art emerged around 50,000 years ago, long before cities and civilisation, withal in forms to which we tin still directly relate. The wall paintings in the Lascaux caves, which so startled Picasso, have been carbon-dated at effectually 17,000 years old. Now, following the invention of photography and the devastating attack made past Duchamp on the self-appointed Art Establishment [see Cursory Lives this consequence], art cannot be simply defined on the footing of concrete 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 we need to ask: What does art do? And the answer is surely that information technology provokes an emotional, rather than a simply cerebral response. One way of approaching the trouble of defining art, and then, could be to say: Art consists of shareable ideas that have a shareable emotional impact. Fine art demand not produce beautiful objects or events, since a great piece of fine art could validly arouse emotions other than those aroused past beauty, such as terror, anxiety, or laughter. Yet to derive an acceptable philosophical theory of art from this agreement means tackling the concept of 'emotion' caput on, and philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to practise this. But not all of them: Robert Solomon'south book The Passions (1993) has made an excellent start, and this seems to me to be the way to get.
Information technology won't exist like shooting fish in a barrel. Poor old Richard Rorty was jumped on from a very great height when all he said was that literature, verse, patriotism, dearest and stuff like that were philosophically important. Art is vitally of import to maintaining broad standards in civilisation. Its pedigree long predates philosophy, which is only 3,000 years old, and science, which is a mere 500 years old. Art deserves much more attention from philosophers.
Alistair MacFarlane, Gwynedd
Some years ago I went looking for fine art. To begin my journey I went to an art gallery. At that stage art to me was whatever I found in an art gallery. I found paintings, mostly, and because they were in the gallery I recognised them as art. A detail Rothko painting was ane color and large. I observed a further piece that did not have an obvious characterization. It was also of ane colour – white – and gigantically big, occupying ane consummate wall of the very high and spacious room and standing on pocket-size roller wheels. On closer inspection I saw that it was a moveable wall, not a slice of fine art. Why could one slice of work be considered 'art' and the other not?
The reply to the question could, possibly, be institute in the criteria of Berys Gaut to decide if some artefact is, indeed, art – that art pieces function only as pieces of fine art, just equally their creators intended.
But were they beautiful? Did they evoke an emotional response in me? Beauty is frequently associated with fine art. There is sometimes an expectation of encountering a 'cute' object when going to run across a piece of work of fine art, exist information technology painting, sculpture, book or performance. Of form, that expectation speedily changes equally one widens the range of installations encountered. The classic instance is Duchamp's Fountain (1917), a rather united nations-beautiful urinal.
Tin nosotros define beauty? Let me endeavour 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 similar Fountain at the initial level of appreciation. There was skill, of course, in its structure. Merely what was the skill in its presentation as art?
Then I began to reach a definition of art. A piece of work of art is that which asks a question which a non-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, only 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 we make meaning beyond linguistic communication. Fine art consists in the making of meaning through intelligent bureau, eliciting an artful response. It's a ways of advice where language is not sufficient to explain or describe its content. Art can return visible and known what was previously unspoken. Because what fine art expresses and evokes is in role ineffable, we find information technology difficult to define and delineate it. It is known through the experience of the audition as well as the intention and expression of the creative person. The meaning is made by all the participants, and so tin can never be 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 civilisation, both supporting the establishment and also preventing destructive letters from being silenced – art leads, mirrors and reveals change in politics and morality. Fine art plays a central part in the creation of culture, and is an outpouring of thought and ideas from it, and and then information technology cannot be fully understood in isolation from its context. Paradoxically, notwithstanding, fine art can communicate across language and time, appealing to our mutual humanity and linking disparate communities. Perhaps if wider audiences engaged with a greater variety of the world's artistic traditions it could engender increased tolerance and mutual respect.
Some other inescapable facet of art is that it is a article. This fact feeds the creative process, whether motivating the creative person to form an item of monetary value, or to avoid creating one, or to artistically commodify the aesthetic experience. The commodification of art also affects who is considered qualified to create fine art, comment on it, and even define it, equally those who benefit most strive to keep the value of 'art objects' high. These influences must feed into a culture's understanding of what art is at whatever time, making thoughts most art culturally dependent. However, this commodification and the consequent closely-guarded role of the art critic too gives rise to a counter culture inside art culture, often expressed through the creation of art that cannot exist sold. The stratification of art by value and the resultant tension also adds to its significant, and the pregnant of art to order.
Catherine Bosley, Monk Soham, Suffolk
Starting time of all we must recognize the obvious. 'Art' is a discussion, and words and concepts are organic and alter their pregnant through time. And so in the olden days, art meant craft. Information technology was something you could excel at through do and hard work. Yous learnt how to pigment or sculpt, and you learnt the special symbolism of your era. Through Romanticism and the nativity of individualism, art came to mean originality. To do something new and never-heard-of defined the artist. His or her personality became essentially as important every bit 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 pigment motion (Cubism, Futurism)? Could you paint the not-textile (Abstract Expressionism)? Fundamentally: could annihilation be regarded as art? A way of trying to solve this problem was to wait beyond the 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 fine art, and which was made public through the institution, e.m. galleries. That's Institutionalism – fabricated famous through Marcel Duchamp'southward ready-mades.
Institutionalism has been the prevailing notion through the after part of the twentieth century, at least in academia, and I would say it withal holds a business firm grip on our conceptions. One instance is the Swedish artist Anna Odell. Her picture sequence Unknown woman 2009-349701, for which she faked psychosis to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, was widely debated, and by many was non regarded as fine art. But considering it was debated by the art earth, information technology succeeded in breaking into the art globe, and is today regarded as art, and Odell is regarded an artist.
Of course there are those who attempt and pause out of this hegemony, for example by refusing to play past the art earth's unwritten rules. Andy Warhol with his Manufactory was one, even though he is today totally embraced past the art earth. Another example is Damien Hirst, who, much like Warhol, pays people to create the physical manifestations of his ideas. He doesn't utilize galleries and other art world-approved arenas to advertise, and instead sells his objects direct to private individuals. This liberal approach to commercialism is one style of attacking the hegemony of the art globe.
What does all this teach u.s.a. most art? Probably that fine art is a fleeting and chimeric concept. We will always have art, just for the virtually office we volition just really learn in retrospect what the art of our era was.
Tommy Törnsten, Linköping, Sweden
Art periods such every bit Classical, Byzantine, neo-Classical, Romantic, Modern and post-Mod reflect the irresolute nature of fine 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 art that inextricably links its instances with acts of observation, without which all that could exist are 'material counterparts' or 'mere real things' rather than artworks. Notwithstanding the competing theories, works of art can be seen to possess 'family resemblances' or 'strands of resemblance' linking very dissimilar instances as fine art. Identifying instances of fine art is relatively straightforward, only a definition of art that includes all possible cases is elusive. Consequently, 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 'Art'; whereas 'art' has a history of previous applications, such as in music, poetry, comedy, tragedy and dance; and we should likewise 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 artful contemplation" – a phrase coined by John Davies, old 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 art. Sufficiency for something to exist 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 as art, nor especially intended to be perceived aesthetically – for instance, votive, devotional, commemorative or commonsensical artefacts. Furthermore, artful interests tin be eclipsed by dubious investment practices and social kudos. When combined with celebrity and harmful forms of narcissism, they can egregiously affect artistic authenticity. These interests can be overriding, and spawn products masquerading every bit art. Then it's up to discerning observers to spot any Fads, Fakes and Fantasies (Sjoerd Hannema, 1970).
Colin Brookes, Loughborough, Leicestershire
For me art is nil more and zippo less than the creative ability of individuals to express their understanding of some attribute of private or public life, similar honey, disharmonize, fearfulness, or pain. Equally I read a state of war poem by Edward Thomas, enjoy a Mozart piano concerto, or contemplate a Thou.C. Escher drawing, I am oftentimes emotionally inspired past the moment and intellectually stimulated by the thought-process that follows. At this moment of discovery I humbly realize my views may be those shared by thousands, even millions across the globe. This is due in large office to the mass media'southward power to control and exploit our emotions. The commercial success of a operation or production becomes the metric by which fine art is at present most exclusively gauged: quality in fine art has been sadly reduced to equating great art with sale of books, number of views, or the downloading of recordings. Also bad if personal sensibilities about a particular piece of art are lost in the greater rush for immediate acceptance.
So where does that leave the subjective notion that dazzler tin can nevertheless exist found in art? If dazzler is the outcome of a procedure by which art gives pleasance to our senses, then it should remain a matter of personal discernment, even if outside forces clamour to have control of information technology. In other words, nobody, including the art critic, should exist able to tell the individual what is beautiful and what is non. The world of art is 1 of a constant tension between preserving individual tastes and promoting popular acceptance.
Ian Malcomson, Victoria, British Columbia
What we perceive equally cute does not offend united states of america on any level. It is a personal sentence, a subjective opinion. A memory from in one case we gazed upon something beautiful, a sight ever and so pleasing to the senses or to the centre, oft time stays with us forever. I shall never forget walking into Balzac's house in France: the odor of lilies was so overwhelming that I had a numinous moment. The intensity of the emotion evoked may non exist possible to explain. I don't feel it'due south important to fence why I think a blossom, painting, sunset or how the light streaming through a stained-glass window is cute. The power of the sights create an emotional reaction in me. I don't expect or concern myself that others will agree with me or not. Tin can all concord that an act of kindness is beautiful?
A thing of dazzler is a whole; elements coming together making it so. A single castor stroke of a painting does not alone create the impact of dazzler, just all together, it becomes beautiful. A perfect flower is cute, when all of the petals together class its perfection; a pleasant, intoxicating scent is also part of the beauty.
In thinking about the question, 'What is beauty?', I've simply come away with the thought that I am the beholder whose eye information technology is in. Suffice it to say, my individual assessment of what strikes me as cute is all I need to know.
Cheryl Anderson, Kenilworth, Illinois
Stendhal said, "Beauty is the hope of happiness", simply this didn't get to the middle of the matter. Whose beauty are we talking most? Whose happiness?
Consider if a snake made art. What would it believe to exist cute? What would it deign to make? Snakes have poor eyesight and notice the globe largely through a chemosensory organ, the Jacobson's organ, or through heat-sensing pits. Would a movie in its human course fifty-fifty make sense to a snake? So their art, their beauty, would be entirely conflicting to ours: it would not be visual, and even if they had songs they would be foreign; after all, snakes do non have ears, they sense vibrations. So art would be sensed, and songs would be felt, if it is even possible to conceive that idea.
From this perspective – a view low to the ground – nosotros tin encounter that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. It may cantankerous our lips to speak of the nature of beauty in bouncing language, but we exercise so entirely with a forked tongue if we practice so seriously. The aesthetics of representing beauty ought non to fool us into thinking beauty, equally some abstract concept, truly exists. Information technology requires a viewer and a context, and the value we place on sure combinations of colors or sounds over others speaks of goose egg more than preference. Our want for pictures, moving or otherwise, is because our organs adult 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 art. Information technology 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 poetry, what would it exist?
Derek Halm, Portland, Oregon
[A: Sssibilance and sussssuration – Ed.]
The questions, 'What is art?' and 'What is beauty?' are dissimilar types and shouldn't exist conflated.
With boring predictability, almost all contemporary discussers of art lapse into a 'relative-off', whereby they become to annoying lengths to demonstrate how open-minded they are and how ineluctably loose the concept of art is. If art is merely whatever you want it to exist, can we not just end the chat in that location? It'south a done deal. I'll throw playdough on to a sail, and we tin can pretend to brandish our modern credentials of acceptance and insight. This just doesn't work, and we all know it. If art is to mean anything, in that location has to be some working definition of what it is. If art tin exist anything to anybody at anytime, then there ends the discussion. What makes art special – and worth discussing – is that it stands above or outside everyday things, such as everyday nutrient, paintwork, or sounds. Art comprises special or exceptional dishes, paintings, and music.
And then what, then, is my definition of fine art? Briefly, I believe there must exist at least two considerations to characterization something as 'art'. The first is that in that location must exist something recognizable in the style of 'author-to-audience reception'. I hateful to say, at that place must be the recognition that something was made for an audience of some kind to receive, talk over or enjoy. Implicit in this point is the evident recognizability of what the fine art actually is – in other words, the author doesn't have to tell y'all it'south art when you otherwise wouldn't have whatever idea. The 2d signal is simply 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. Even if you disagree with the particulars, some definition is required to make anything at all art. Otherwise, what are nosotros fifty-fifty discussing? I'm breaking the mold and ask for brass tacks.
Brannon McConkey, Tennessee
Author of Student of Life: Why Condign Engaged in Life, Fine art, and Philosophy Tin Lead to a Happier Existence
Human 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 sentinel for correlations, eager to determine cause and effect, so that we might give sense to what might otherwise seem random and inconsequential. Yet, particularly in the last century, we have also learned to have pleasure in the reflection of unstructured perceptions; our artistic ways of seeing and listening take expanded to cover disharmony and irregularity. This has meant that culturally, an ever-widening gap has grown between the attitudes and opinions of the majority, who continue to define fine art in traditional ways, having to do with order, harmony, representation; and the minority, who look for originality, who try to run into the earth anew, and strive for departure, and whose critical practice is rooted in brainchild. In between there are many who abjure both extremes, and who both observe and requite pleasure both in defining a personal vision and in practising craftsmanship.
There will always be a challenge to traditional concepts of art from the shock of the new, and tensions effectually the appropriateness of our understanding. That is how things should be, as innovators push at the boundaries. At the same time, nosotros volition keep to take pleasure in the beauty of a mathematical equation, a finely-tuned machine, a successful scientific experiment, the applied science of landing a probe on a comet, an achieved poem, a hitting portrait, the sound-world of a symphony. We apportion significance and meaning to what we observe of value and wish to share with our fellows. Our fine art and our definitions of dazzler reflect our human nature and the multiplicity of our artistic efforts.
In the end, because of our individuality and our varied histories and traditions, our debates will always be inconclusive. If we are wise, we will await and listen with an open spirit, and sometimes with a wry smile, always jubilant the multifariousness of human imaginings and achievements.
David Howard, Church Stretton, Shropshire
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