What is Art?

Defining Art


When people ask me to compare the 20th century to older civilizations, I always say the same thing: “The situation is normal.”& nbsp; –Will Durant

I Can’t Believe This Is Art!

Mat Gleason is an art critic that deals with whether or not work that is classified as art is art, or not. He deals with the ideas of; is a scribble art, is a color field painting art. He has authored a book titled “Most Art Sucks”. The following clips will demonstrate how tricky this question can be.

Have you looked at a work of art in a museum or in a text book and wondered why it was art? You will be happy to know that you are not alone. Throughout time people have been looking at artist’s work and thinking that the artist is way out of line. This experience is a dispute known as a classification dispute; in other words, an argument that the object is not art.


Classification Dispute

Art historians and philosophers of art have long disagreed about art on the subject of whether an actual cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Ancient Greek philosophers debated about whether ethics should be considered the “art of living well.” In the late 1800s, photography and cinema were both considered not to be art, and prominent critics argued that early cubist paintings were not art.

Fountian


Perhaps the most important classification dispute was in 1917 when Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal which he titled “Fountain” in an art exhibit. Duchamp paved the way to a long list of disagreements about twentieth century art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today.

These arguments in the 20th century include conceptual art, which often intentionally pushes the boundaries of what counts as art. These questions are more often about our values and where we are trying to go with our society than they are about defining art.

What is conceptual art? Up until the 20th century art making involved creating a product or object. Conceptual art is an art form where the idea and the process are more important than the product or object created.

Thinking In And Outside The Box

The ideas and art of the 20th century may seem wildly different, but artists always tend to create art that is outside what is accepted. This thinking outside of the box is what has caused new ideas and philosophies to occur in the art world. This thinking has caused the beginning of new art movements.

Artists thinking out of the box in the 20th century included: cubist and impressionist paintings. We love Monet and Renoir, but early audiences were appalled when they first saw impressionistic work, commenting that it could scare animals.

Conceptual art often pushes the boundaries of what counts as art on purpose and a number of recent well know conceptual artists, have produced works about which there are a great number of active arguments of whether or not it is art. Here, Kosuth concept involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.

'One and Three Chairs' (1965), by the U.S. artist, Joseph Kosuth. A key early work of Conceptual art by one of the movement's most influential artists.

Whose Definition Of Art Is This?

"Even though I don’t know much about art I at least know what I like, and I don’t like this.” The problem goes beyond like and dislike to the matter of defining art. Are you defining art in today’s definition of art?

Defining the difference between that which is trite, (perhaps mundane, not original and not art) and that which is profound, (intense, thoughtful and insightful) can be elusive and hard to define. Aesthetics and the philosophy of art, often engage in disagreements about the best way to define art.

Many arguments about whether to consider something art or not, wind up revolving around how we define art. By its broadest definition, art is the product or process of the successful handling of knowledge, most often using a set of skills. In other words, a successful art object is made by a skillful knowledgeable person. However, in the modern use of the word, which rose to prominence after 1750, “art” is commonly understood to be skill used to produce an aesthetic result.

Britannica online defines it as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others".

But how best to define the term “art” today is a subject of much disagreement. Many books and journal articles have been published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term “art”. It is not clear who has the right to define art. Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational definitions that are not very similar to each others. What is your definition of art?

Does Beauty Equal Good Art?


Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. ~Leonardo da Vinci

That Is So Pretty!

The phrase "this is beautiful" with "this is art" has been practiced by the audience for most of time. Visual art has been defined as the arrangement of colors, forms, or other elements "in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium. However, it is not correct to assume that beautiful objects make good art.

We can call a person, a house, a symphony, a fragrance, and a mathematical proof beautiful. What characteristics do they share which give them that status? What possible feature could math and a fragrance both share in virtue of which they both count as beautiful? What makes a painting beautiful may be quite different from what makes music beautiful, which suggests that each art form has its own system for the judgment of aesthetics.

Viewer interpretations of beauty possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of education and awareness of select cultural values; therefore taste can be learned. Taste varies according to class, cultural background, and education. Indeed, beauty does seem to be in the eye of the beholder. Defining an art object beautiful is a subjective decision.

Does It Matter Who The Artist Intended To View The Work?

Shepard Fairey created work initially for Obey Andre the Giant initially for skateboard enthusiasts. See Shepard Fairey’s Art.

Art is often created for a specific audience or person. Art has been created for the church, for royalty, for the wealthy, for specific individuals as well as for the artist himself. The art work may be just what the intended audience wanted and mean absolutely nothing to other individuals.

How important is the idea that the artist wants to say through the artwork? Great art means something years later to future generations. This is the time test factor. Will we consider this idea or artwork great years after is created? It has to be a universal idea or a spectacular work of art for this to occur.

How Art Looks and What it Means


"I'm painting this way because I want to be a machine," commented Andy Warhol in 1963 about his way of working.
Fueled by the New York scene and central to Pop art.


Warhol generated his own celebrity as well as massive amounts of artwork. Not only did he produce Brillo at his studio, known as The Factory, but also numerous series of prints, films, and music. Did Warhol want to be a machine, or did he have other reasons to create his work?

A Conversation With Art

If you could have a conversation with an artist or an artwork, who do you think would tell you the most? Viewing a work of art is like holding a conversation with both the artist and the artwork. However, this conversation is not one sided. How much responsibility falls on the artist, to interpret an art work, and how much falls on the viewer?

Do you prefer challenging work, or pleasant, easy to understand work? Sometimes interpreting art is easy, sometimes it’s challenging, and at times it is darn frustrating.

The Interview: You are about to interview artist Andy Warhol to discuss the dynamic artwork shown below.



Brillo 1964
plywood boxes with serigraph and acrylic
boxes: 43.2 x 43.2 x 35.6 cm each
Purchased 1967

Lets see what Warhol had to say about "Brillo".


Unfortunately his answer reveals nothing! Perhaps you need a critic to interview the illusive Mr. Warhol!

That was a lot better! But you still are in the dark.

Next you interview the artwork. You ask, “How do we know who we are?”
“Brillo” Answers: "Society tells us."

Yes, I realize that this has been a fanciful bit of nonsense, but trying to interpret and understand a work of art such as Warhol’s Brillo can be quite a frustrating experience. But for a minute consider the answer, to - How do we know who we are? What if society lies, then how do we know who we are? Let’s consider this question by examining Andy Warhol’s work.

When applying the descriptive vocabulary featured above the first thing we can determine about “Brillo” is that Warhol replicated this art work realistically. - I can easily identify the subject as a stack of Brillo boxes. But wait just one minute. Each box is about three foot by three foot. That means it is representational but the size is not. Do you suppose that this means something?

We can certainly understand the content, a stack of Brillo boxes. Can you guess anything about the context of this work? It was created in the 1960s in the United States. How about Iconography? Do you suppose the Brillo boxes are a symbol for something? Perhaps they are a symbol for cleaning. Or maybe it is a remark on the need for cleaning in 1960’s America.

Did you learn anything more from the work of art than from the artist? The only thing meaningful I got out of this interview is that the work is Pop Art. Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the United States. Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture.

Andy Warhol shocked people with his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, coupled with such provocative statements as: "The reason I'm painting this way is because I want to be a machine." By taking his imagery from advertising and the mass media, Warhol attacked the separation of art from mass culture.

So here is the problem and answer once again. How do we know who we are? Society tells us. What if society lies? How can we know who we are?

Do you think that the artwork can help us see who we are?

What are the Differences between Art and Craft, a War of Sorts

"Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Less than five percent of the artists in the Modern Arts section are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female.” Guerrilla Girls




Imagine…yesterday afternoon you were in the Library and came across a painting of a nude woman, reclining on a divan, a gorilla mask covering her head. A gorilla mask you ask. Yes! Intrigued, you read the above text. "It's shocking," says the librarian, "which is the Guerrilla Girls intent -- to shock you, make you notice."

The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous women activists fighting for gender and racial equality within the New York art world. These women know firsthand the lack of female artists in the city's museums and galleries: In "real life," they are artists, curators, and art historians. As individuals, they remain quiet to avoid alienation from the art community. As a group, they don gorilla masks to hide their faces and assume the names of dead female artists, in part to further conceal their identities, but also to bring recognition to talented but mostly unknown women.

Their name is as calculated as their anonymity. "Their collective name -- Guerrilla Girls -- allows them to create multiple levels of who and why they are," The librarian explains. "The gorilla mask hides the faces and the identities, yet creates an identity of its own. The masks make an impression on the audience. However, the name is spelled 'guerilla' to represent their activist role".

Why is this still necessary? The division between art and craft for the last four to five hundred years has stood primarily to divide art from craft, artwork from women’s work. As you may surmise the bias by numbers alone is significant enough to examine. It is still a very hot topic. In the last ten years a number of top art programs across the country dropped the word Craft from their title because of fear that it somehow lessened their image.
Marginalization of Non Western Art and Woman’s Art through Craft
It's easy to dismiss handmade work as trivial or pointless activity in the machine age, especially when it's made by women. Crafts traditionally done by women have been undervalued and dismissed by patriarchal society for centuries. Doing so just plays into the false dichotomy men have always built between professional and home production. This marginalization is categorizing art made by others as inferior or less important.

It's not who does it, it's the quality of the work the matters.

Craft is more than women's work, and it's not, less important or original than art. The common denominator in both art and craft, regardless of who's making it, is the desire to make something, to have a tangible product that you yourself constructed, simply because it's satisfying, because it says something about you and how you see the world, about what you value. Whether that object is also useful or not doesn't matter.

Click Here to Watch Glass Video

The Women’s Art Movement

Contemporary feminist art originated in about 1970, inspired by the Women's Liberation Movement which was sweeping the country at this time, bringing with it demands for social, economic and political change. Women began to join together to demand greater representation and an end to the marginalization of women socially, economically, and politically.

In this same period, women artists began to organize. Women artists came together to advocate for themselves. In the exhibition of art, it was common and accepted for exhibitions to be made up of all white males. Women of color were doubly discriminated against, with artists like Faith Ringgold told they could only exhibit in the museums devoted to African American art after all the black male artists had had their shows.


In the early 1970s, women artists and activists demonstrated at museums and exposed the sexist practices of galleries and art schools. Women visual artists, art educators and art historians formed consciousness raising groups, woman-centered art education programs, women’s art organizations, and cooperative galleries to provide the visibility that they had been denied.

However, feminist artists sought more than equal representation. They believed that art could help bring about social and political change. The power of art to change the self and society is still central to many feminist artists’ work.

What Exactly Is Craft?

Let me ask you something, what is not art? ~Author Unknown


Craft can be a confusing word. When you use it there is a strong possibility that the other person is thinking about something quite different to you. One person imagines handmade one of a kind pieces while another thinks of stenciled furniture and stamps. And it doesn’t get any easier when you get beyond the word craft to a specific discipline such as glass or textiles, as again everyone will imagine something different.

What is the difference between art and craft? Both involve creating, problem solving, composition and design decisions, pattern recognition, intuition, etc. I consider things a spectrum of kinds of work, no boundaries or strict edges to things, more of a blur. It has to do with intent perhaps, what is the intent of the object. Art and craft are differentiated by customs and border control laws by practical function. If you can wear it or put peanuts into it is craft. Or if there are more than 49 of them - prints, both photographic and other done in editions magically turn from fine art into product if there are 50 or more of them.

Craft is defined as skill in doing or making something, as in the arts, proficiency, or an occupation or trade requiring manual dexterity or skilled artistry, to make by hand and with much skill. It is also referred to as the artist's technical skill or ability beyond the aesthetic value of a work. Today most text books define craft as one-of-a-kind objects made of metal, clay, glass, wood, fiber and found objects.

One-of-a-kind objects are objects that are created by craftsmen and fine artists using craft media, and are meant to stand on their own as works of art. There is clearly an artistic, individual intent present in this work. While these objects often are influenced by a historical reference or a school of thought, they are not meant to be merely copies. While these objects may at times be designed for use, their main purpose is artistic and not functional.

Artist Peter Voulkos During a 1974 demo

The Arts and Crafts Movement

In the early nineteenth century it became increasingly popular for rural Americans of modest means to take the decoration of their homes and furniture into their own hands. This became the American Arts and Crafts Movement. The artist Rufus Porter was an early proponent of the American craft movement, who believed that the arts needed to be accessible to, and appreciated by, the nation as a whole.

Louis Comfort Tiffany

By the end of the nineteenth century, the pre-industrial craft trades had almost totally disappeared. Industrial expansion and westward movement had largely severed American culture from early Colonial American and Native American craft roots. Against this backdrop, Louis Comfort Tiffany was a pioneer of the American craft movement, arguing for the placement of well-designed and crafted objects in the American home.


The studio crafts movement was fostered by the establishment of crafts programs within post-secondary educational institutions. In 1894, for example, North America's first university ceramics department was begun at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. After World War I American art programs began to include craft studies into their curricula.

Throughout the 1950s and afterwards, potter Peter Voulkos developed increasingly large-scale and nontraditional ceramic works, influenced by Abstract Expressionism, which transformed traditional understandings of the craft media. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Voulkos emphasized performance, process and primal expression in his ceramic forms. Voulkos was also influenced by Zen Buddhism after a 1952 encounter with prominent Japanese potter Shoji Hamada.

The culture of the 1960s was even more conducive to the development of studio crafts. This period saw a rejection of materialism and exploration of alternative ways of living. For some, the creation of handicrafts provided just such an outlet. Over the years, Harvey Littleton trained many of the most important contemporary glass artists, including Dale Chihuly, Christopher Ries, and Marvin Lipofsky. These Littleton students in turn developed the new movement and spread it across the country.
glass

THE ART WORLD How Does it Get to be Fine Art?


"Though a living cannot be made at art, art makes life worth living. It makes living, living. It makes starving, living. It makes worry, it makes trouble, it makes a life that would be barren of everything -- living. It brings life to life.” John Sloan in Gist of Art, 1939


The “Art World” has a lot to do with deciding who makes it as a professional artist. The art world is a very informally structured society of artists, critics, dealers, galleries, museums, collectors, and educators who work with art. The art world is a business as well and provides a livelihood to many people, including artists.

Those in the art world have the ability to influence taste, the appreciation for art that is acquired through culture or education. (Bad taste would imply that one was not exposed or educated in art.) In order for something to be considered art or for artists to become well known in the art world, the work or artists must meet with a sort of “stamp of approval” from the art world, such as receiving training from a prestigious art school, getting a positive review from an art critic, having their work collected by trend-setting collectors, or exhibiting in prominent galleries or museums.

For instance, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, needed to be ratified as a work of art to be considered art, and Duchamp’s name was already included in the world of art; a plumber or an anonymous artist would not have been able to do the same thing.


  • The Art Market
The cost of a work of art is determined by the art market: the buying and selling of art, especially at galleries and auction houses. In 1961, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought Aristotle with a Bust of Homer by Rembrandt for the then record-price of over $2 million. In 1987, Vincent van Gogh’s Irises sold for $53.9 million, and in 1990, van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet commanded $82.5 million. The price of art is set by economic supply and demand determined by factors such as the scarcity of the artist’s work, the number of collectors willing to buy, the state of the economy itself, and what style of art is in fashion at the moment.
  • Art Galleries
Art galleries are businesses that exhibit and sell an artist’s work. Galleries are found in many communities throughout the country, especially in large cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. New York has the most prestigious galleries, so it is the place to show work and helps to establish an artist’s career.

Problems with the gallery system include only promoting art that is sellable, artists creating only the same type of art that sells, and discrimination of women and minority artists, something the anonymous Guerrilla Girls have been protesting since the 1980s. Many galleries will specialize in a certain style of art, and the art dealers who run the gallery may handle about fifteen to twenty artists.
  • Alternatives to the Gallery System
For a variety of reasons, artists may choose to exhibit their work in spaces other than a gallery. Artists’ organizations are independent coalitions of artists who sell their work together in a manner much like how a gallery works. Some artists use alternate spaces like storefronts, warehouses (like MoMA’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center on Long Island), churches, coffeehouses, and even subways, as seen in the photograph of Keith Haring at work.

Some video and computer art are exhibited on cable stations, websites, and mail-order distributions. Some artists rely on governmental funds, such as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), for financial support.
  • Collectors
Collectors are the people who spend money on works of art, asserting influence in the demand for an artist’s work. Collecting began in ancient Greece as a way to display conquests and culture. The aristocracy has traditionally been collectors of art, seen in the painting The Picture Gallery of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm.

Today, most collectors are wealthy, and celebrities such as Bill Cosby and Steve Martin are well known collectors. Average people who budget carefully and choose wisely can also amass a nice collection of art, as Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, a postal clerk and librarian, were able to do. Corporations, such as IBM and Philip Morris, can also be collectors of art. Problems do arise when ancient art and artifacts are illegally dug up and sold to collectors, literally robbing a country of its national treasures.
  • Patrons
Patrons are people who buy art in a direct manner from the artist and who may assist the artist financially, making the creation of art possible. Patrons have existed since ancient times; Pericles’ supported and directed the architect Phidias on the Parthenon and its sculptures. During the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, patrons often had their portraits painted or sculpted within the art, as in the case of Titian’s Madonna of the Pesaro Family.
  • Auction Houses
The two major auction houses in the selling of art are New York and London’s Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which are responsible for handing about 90 percent of the market. The rules of auctioning are mysterious to those not in the circuit, with minimum prices that are initially set and are purchased by the auction houses, unknowingly to the public, if the art doesn’t meet that minimum bid. Although the auction houses were beset by scandal in the 1990s, they are still selling works to the highest bidder, sometimes to the tune of $104 million for a Picasso.

Forgery and Fakes

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. ~John Ruskin

A forgery is the deliberate falsification of another artist’s work. Forgers like Han van Meegeren deliberately deceive those in the art world, often by using very sophisticated techniques and authentic materials that mimic the art they replicate. Forgers today usually replicate antiquities and Pre-Columbian art since there is often a gap in knowledge from that time period or culture.


Artwork can also be deemed inauthentic or false if it is a reproduction of another’s work without intention to deceive. When there is no documentation, a museum has to discern whether the work is genuine by scientific analysis and expert opinion. To determine whether Rembrandt works, such as Polish Rider) were authentic, the Rembrandt Research Project used scientific investigation and analysis, and they found that about half of the six hundred Rembrandts are not authentic, findings that many historians and owners dispute.


Museums

The idea of an art museum began in the late eighteenth century when private, aristocratic collections of art, such as the collection of the duke of Florence seen in John Zoffany’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi, were opened up to the public primarily so artists could see master works of art. In the nineteenth century, museums were seen as a means to inspire virtue. Today, museums educate the public about their collections.

The Critics

Art critics are experts who write criticism on art and usually judge something as good or bad. Art criticism began in the eighteenth century as a means to guide opinion when artists began showing their work publicly. Such display opened up the ability for the general public to purchase art and replaced the system in which artists create and sell work just to patrons, as Salon at the Louvre (3) illustrates.

In the 1940s, critic Clement Greenberg helped establish the Abstract Expressionists as avante garde artists worthy of acceptance by the art world. Today, much of art criticism won’ t make or break any careers, but it may help to generate interest.


Everyone likes to get in on the act of art criticism. In fact, according to new art criticism studies in many graduate programs, much may be learned by lay-peoples interpretation of art. This work has been highly criticized.


Christo and Jean Claude have captured the attention of twenty-first century critic and art lovers alike with the “Gates” an installation artwork in “ New York 2005.


The Gates

  • "The Gates" have forced Stephen Colbert to recontextualize his notion of what $21 million can be used for.
  • On a more serious note take a look at what these critics said about the Gates and conceptual art.
Art Criticism can some times help rather than hurting a career. Take a look at the links to controversial art topics listed below.


Outside Links: You be the Critic

View Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work
Chris Ofili
MOBA

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