Art and Creativity
"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
What Is Creativity?
Your fairy Godmother is about to grant you one wish, she waves her wand and abra-cad-abra you are the most creative person on the planet. Believe me I would not wish this on you. Take a look at some of the most creative minds in today’s art world. Take a look at work by artist Matthew Barney. Where does he get his creativity? Do you think he was born with it or was it learned? Can he loose it?Matthew Barney
The most celebrated American artist of the moment, Matthew Barney, makes art on a Hollywood scales with videos, sculptures, photographs and drawings. His Cremaster Cycle - the art world's answer to Star Wars - is still attracting visitors at the Guggenheim in New York.
The Cremaster
Take a look at some of his art work at Mathew Barney at PBS by clicking on the link. You will be leaving the distance learning site. Be sure to click your back button when you finish looking at his work
What do you think? Is Barney creative? What is your definition of creativity? Are artists more creative than other people? Take a look at the following list of creative traits and think some more about Matthew Barney. Go back and look at one of his videos. Are you put off by his outlandish ideas?
Eight Traits of Creative People
Creative people tend to possess certain traits:1. Sensitivity- heightened awareness
2. Flexibility- adapt to new possibilities
3. Originality- problem solving creatively
4. Playfulness- humor & experimentation
5. Productivity- ability to generate ideas
6. Fluency- free flow of ideas
7. Analytical skill- exploring problems, & finding how they work
8. Organizational skill- putting things together in a coherent order
Now take a look at artist George Condo. Artist George Condo paints what he sees - - - in his imagination that is. Clearly, Condo feels that his paintings will enlighten others, showing them strange beings that they themselves cannot see.
Art and Perception
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. ~Scott Adams
Perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined. It is a cognitive process which means "receiving, collecting, and action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses. The nature of perception suggests that the most important key to looking at art is to become aware of the process of looking itself. There are two basic theories of perception: Passive Perception and Active Perception.
In passive perception the following sequence of events occur. In your surrounding - input (senses) - processing (brain) - output (re-action). When I sit in my office at times things in the hall don't affect me, or affect me very little. I can concentrate on my work and ignore what is happening. This is passive perception.
My first art professor stated that it is in this mode that we view most art. These are "Uh-huh" art works. If we can walk by them and go "uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" we are not having a strong reaction. I do not want people to have a "uh-huh reaction to my work. I want them to stop, look at it and think about it. Did you experience a strong reaction to Barney or Condo's work?
The theory of active perception has emerged from extensive research of sensory illusions. This theory is increasingly gaining experimental support and could be surmised as dynamic relationship between “description” (in the brain) - senses - surrounding. You had a strong reaction of some kind. Were you aware that you were looking at the art work?
The facts that you read about Barney or Condo may have colored your reaction to their work. For example if I had said look at these two people who are pretending to make artwork you may very well had a more stilted reaction to their work.
Who Decides That This Is Art!
Your strong reaction may or may not have little to do with the information you have received about these two artists. At this point you may wonder how a person becomes an artist, or who decides on the qualifications of these two individuals. You might remember that Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle is on display at the Guggenheim in New York. The Guggenheim is considered to be one of the top art museums in the art world. To be seen as a truly successful star in the art world one must either graduate from a top art program, or be accepted by a top museum or gallery. Indeed, New York is the center of the art world. More information will be directed about the art world in the next few lessons.
Why when someone doesn't understand something, this person says that this thing is meaningless? Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher, said that modern art divides people into two groups: the group that can understand it and the other part of the people, who cannot. Also he said that this second group feels frustrated.
Were you surprised to see that Barney's work involves live participants? This is known as performance art. Performance Art is art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time.
Perhaps its time to examine what is or is not included in the definition of Fine Art. What's Included in Art? Music, Dance, Theater, Literature and Visual Arts... Traditionally the fine arts include the previous areas. Ballet for example would be dance but also could be included into a visual arts performance piece. Music and literature can also be combined within a performance work. Barney combines all of these within his movies.
The Value of ArtLife beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. ~Stella Adler
If you did not like Barney's or Condo's work then you may wonder why it is included in a great museum like the Guggenheim. It's time to consider what factors make a work of art valuable in different ways to different people.
Certainly value has more than one definition. Some works of art have a greater monetary value than others. This has to do with its popularity among art collectors. 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 monetary value of a major artwork is more or less set by these auction houses.
Another type of value would be the significance of the art work or its impact upon society. I think that the most obvious similarity between monetary value and cultural value is that dedicated artists tend to create art that reflects important aspects of their lives and society.
What is it that makes me an artist? Why do I practice art? Why does anyone immerse themselves in abstract activities that, for the most part, do not add to financial security or other measurable values? The majority of artists make work knowing that their work will probably never achieve great monetary value, or will probably not achieve great significance in the art world. Then why do they do what they do?
Starry Night Sketch
"...suffering as I am, I cannot do without something greater than myself, something which is my life -- the power to create. And if, deprived of the physical power, one tries to create thoughts instead of children, one is still very much part of humanity. And in my pictures I want to say something consoling, as music does. I want to paint men and women with a touch of the eternal, whose symbol was once the halo, which we try to convey by the very radiance and vibrancy of our colouring." van Gogh to Theo, 3 September 1888.
Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime. Today his work is considered priceless. Although Vincent van Gogh suffered emotionally throughout his life, he was able to give his emotions tangible form in his art works.
We know that art has been around before written language. Ancient carvings and cave-wall paintings attest to an early drive to participate in artistic endeavors. I would say that our skills as artists have improved since the first cave paintings… but I think there must be the same seed of creativity that connects long forgotten ancestors and modern artists. As human society evolved into more stable communities, the art changed.
We are a long way from those cavemen and I am confident that mass media and the internet have a large role in the change of today's society. Perhaps we are still too early in the new era to be able to define the motivating factor behind the art that will last. The most important meaning of an artwork is what it means to the viewer.T o me this is the true value of an artwork.
- Does it impact someone?
- Does it impact culture?
- Does it impact society?
- Will it impact future people?
Why Create?
What Do Artists Do - Why Do They Create?
"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman..." Emile Zola to Cézanne
One of the most difficult things to understand about art as we look at the wild variations of ideas about twenty-first century art is; why do artists create their art. Students often ask me if they are all on drugs. No of course not. Art is a reaction to the society and the times of the artists. This is not a perfect world. Art is about more than a reaction to the beautiful. As Rob Zombie described, art is not safe.
London Street Art
Thank goodness artists are creative thinkers! Mans’ flight to the moon was created long before technology was developed through fiction. So are most of our technological advancements. Look to Star Track the next time you pick up your cell phone.What Do Artists Do
- Artists Create Places for Some Human Purpose
Frank Lloyd Wright was just this type of artist. He wrote, “Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.”
His buildings and his ideas have been studied and applied by architects for more than one hundred years. His sensitivity to the environment and the buildings are summed up in the following statement. ”No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.”
- Artists Create Extraordinary Versions of Ordinary Objects
http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=1156
Chuck Close creates ten foot heads that are both realistic and decorative. They are truly extraordinary. Close said this about his paintings, "The idea was to make something that was so large that it could not be readily seen as a whole... as if they were Gulliver's Lilliputians crawling over the surface of the face, falling into a nostril and tripping over a mustache hair."
- Artists Record and Commemorate
Artist Robert Henri wrote about his experiences with creating art from studying and recording the human form. "There is nothing in all the world more beautiful or significant of the laws of the universe than the nude human body... When we respect the nude we will no longer have any shame about it."
- Artists Give Tangible Form to the Unknown
Twentieth century painter, Georgia O’Keeffe, wrote to her best friend advice identifying the unknown in art. "...whether you succeed or not is irrelevant -- There is no such thing -- Making your unknown known is the important thing -- and keeping the unknown always beyond you – catching, crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life”.
- Artists Give Tangible Form to Feelings and Ideas
- Artists Refresh our Vision and Help us to See the World
How do you see the world around you? Do you look through “ rose colored glasses” and see only the good in people? Or do you look through gray gloomy lenses and see a dark depressing world? Artists try to get us to see the world in a new way.
Twentieth Century painter Paul Klee writes about the truth in his vision about the art of portraiture. “Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface (this can be done by the photographic plate), but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones."
Through art we see the world in someone else's eyes. This world is rapidly changing and the artistic reflection of this world is often difficult to see without considering the artistic vision. Artists allow us to see the world in earlier times before we were alive.
Vincent van Gogh
"Art is jealous, she doesn't like taking second place an indisposition. Hence I shall humor her. ... What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don't think I am raising my sights to high. I want to do drawings that touch some people."
van Gogh writes to his brother Theo, 21 July 1882
Artist Vincent van Gogh’s vision was extraordinary whether he was painting an ordinary object, recording what he saw, or making the unknown concrete. His belief that “we take death to reach a star,” as represented in Starry Night, as an example of a work of art that visually expresses an idea.
In Starry Night van Gogh's night sky is a field of roiling energy. Below the exploding stars, the village is a place of quiet order. Connecting earth and sky is the flame like cypress, a tree traditionally associated with graveyards and mourning. But death was not ominous for van Gogh. "Looking at the stars always makes me dream," he said, "Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star."
The artist wrote of his experience to his brother Theo: "This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big." This morning star, or Venus, may be the large white star just left of center in The Starry Night. The hamlet, on the other hand, is invented, and the church spire evokes van Gogh's native land, the Netherlands. The painting, like its daytime companion, The Olive Trees, is rooted in imagination and memory."
Theo van Gogh was more than Vincent's brother. He saved every painting and drawing that his brother created, while trying to sell them in galleries and to dealers. He provided money and materials so that Vincent could create art and survive, all while encouraging him to continue. We owe as much to Theo van Gogh as we do to his brother Vincent.
No comments:
Post a Comment