What is a painting?
I want to start a thread that's more focused on the "traditional" questions of aesthetics.
What is a painting, as opposed to a drawing? Is there a category which painting and drawing share? Suppose sculpture as a point of comparison, along with glass blowing and theatre.
What makes a painting a painting? Is it that it's done with paint? No, because we use paint in many circumstances that are not exactly artistic like painting a bedroom some semi-off-white -- there's a technique involved (hence aesthetic judgment of a good and bad paint job), but it's not what we'd call art in the traditional sense of using "painting" as an artform.
What is it that makes a painting appear as a painting?
What is a painting, as opposed to a drawing? Is there a category which painting and drawing share? Suppose sculpture as a point of comparison, along with glass blowing and theatre.
What makes a painting a painting? Is it that it's done with paint? No, because we use paint in many circumstances that are not exactly artistic like painting a bedroom some semi-off-white -- there's a technique involved (hence aesthetic judgment of a good and bad paint job), but it's not what we'd call art in the traditional sense of using "painting" as an artform.
What is it that makes a painting appear as a painting?
Comments (356)
Not this (or so it says :))
I'm going to say Yes, but the next question is, "What makes a painting art?" As you say, why isn't a "painting" that covers my walls with white paint, art? Or could it be, ever?
Quoting Moliere
So what are these circumstances that are artistic? Should we bring in Danto at this point? He asks a similar question: Is it some feature or quality of the art object that tells us it is art?
Quoting Moliere
That is, as something that fall under the rubric "art" as opposed to "wallpainting". A couple of possibilities:
1) Yes, it's something about the painted thing itself that reveals it to be art.
2) No, the "circumstances" that reveal art are exactly that -- circumstances, understandings, things we ourselves have to put in place, as opposed to discover within the object itself.
The object itself has, traditionally, been seen as offering us the necessary information, making (1) seem plausible, but after the developments of the 20th century, that's no longer an option. Or so Danto, and I, would say.
Further, not all paintings are pictures...
At the least, something being art is dependent on how we chose to talk about it.
Quoting Banno
Quoting J
We're all saying the same thing here. So the interesting question is, What are those stories? What are those circumstances? How do they vary from era to era, culture to culture?
So have we moved from aesthetics to Art History?
And why is there not an expression for visual arts equivalent to "musicology"?
Is a painting of a drawing of a painting a painting or a drawing? Is a painting of a house a house or a painting? Is it different to say say "nice smile" or "nice painting of a smile" when referring to the Mona Lisa?
Are these questions aesthetic questions, linguistic, or metaphysical? Is a representation art, symbol, or a phenomenonal state?
Just what is the house?
Not sure what you mean here. Need not words.
But I'll give them anyway.
Quoting Hanover
Painting of a (drawing of a (painting of a (house)))
The outermost quantifier determine all. So
Quoting Hanover
A painting.
Quoting Hanover
A painting.
Quoting Hanover
"Nice smile" picks out the smile. "Nice painting of a smile" picks out the painting.
Quoting Hanover
Issues of scope, so perhaps logical.
Quoting Hanover
Quoting Hanover
That'll depend on the use to which we put each term. There's no fact of the matter until we choose.
This seems like a weird question. I feel that there is a mix up here in one term being used to mean different things.
Clearly painting a fence is a mundane and necessary action, just as painting a wall is. Art is about producing something that has no mundane function to it,although the two can cross over if one wishes to paint their fence with a certain scheme or theme in mind. Just because painting is a gerund it does not make it different from drawing, other than by way of the tools and materials used.
At a strecth one could argue that, depending on cultural traditions, the effect of drawing use often associated with writing, whereas painting is usually something more broad - as in painting a larger object. Scale and rationality may sneak in when it comes to using a tool more familiar as a writing impliment than as a means of producing art ... but then again, poetry is art too! How much this effects the user is likley quite a subjective element.
I have come to the conclusion that forms of art are all about offering up a means of viewing the human experience through different spacio-temporal lenses. The static picture extends thorugh time, the moving picture or piece of music spreads a single item of human experience out.
Through each different medium we effectively extend or contract in opposition to how the art form is presented.
Doesnt it matter why we are asking? What purpose will the answer serve?
If you are tallying the number of paintings, drawings and sculptures owned by the museum for purposes of a security audit, wouldnt the right answer have its own criteria that might even insult one of the artists? In such case, there has to be one specific answer, boiled down to a number, or there will be no way to insure or protect the museum.
So you set the criteria and draw the lines. And that is that.
Likely, with artists being artists, the auditor will be forced to throw certain works into a fourth miscellaneous category because painting, drawing and sculpture are not going to capture all that artists can do with paints, pencils and solids. At least not to an auditor type person.
But, a painting is an art form where an artist uses paint applied to what is usually a flat surface (such as a rectangular canvas) to create a visual experience.
So now, what is art?
What is an artist?
What counts as paint?
How flat is flat?
Why usually?
What does visual experience mean?
Are colors essential, or can white paint on a white surface make a painting?
Is there anything else? What else?
I googled Moliere - he was a playwrite described as a literary painter because of how vividly he painted his characters.
I guess well never know now. Thanks Moliere. And Moliere.
A picture? Tell this to surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí. :snicker:
Art is the persistence of memory -- Salvador Dalí.
The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order.
Isn't painting the way we express our dreams and hallucinations, while drawing is a simple technique?
I'm not seeing the relevance of your comment about the painting and the wall.
All paintings and drawings are pictures on my definition (which is not to say all paintings are representational in case that was how you read it).
In any case I was answering the questions "What is a painting as opposed to a drawing?". Both are applications of some medium or other on some surface or other, and I was pointing out that generally 'painting' refers to works which use predominately wet mediums and 'drawing' refers to works which use predominately dry mediums.
Quoting javi2541997
Why would you say that is not a picture?
Quoting javi2541997
'Painting' as a verb signifies the act, and as a noun the product of the act. Same with 'drawing'.
How does a Last Supper differer from a coat of off-white?
Quoting Janus
...unless it was painted using Microsoft paint.
Point being, whatever rule is offered, someone will produce an exception. That's not saying you are mistaken.
If a coat of off-white is presented on a surface as an artwork, then the only difference is that the former is clearly a representational work. I say both are pictures in that they are both designed to depict something. I suppose you could say they are both representational in that one represents a gathering of people at a meal and the other represents an idea, but I think that would be stretching it.
Quoting Banno
Sure but I don't think Microsoft paint is really paint, but is rather "paint", just as Microsoft pencil, charcoal or pastel is not pencil, charcoal or pastel. Digitally produced works do not count as one or the other, but as prints (if they are printed out that is).
If I am not mistaken, I think you use the word 'picture' thinking of the way of representing real life. At least pictures and photographs are about that. Nonetheless, there are artists (such as Dalí) who painted surrealismo. His paintings were far from a picture but a good example of how our imagination and mind can work.
Quoting Janus
So, you don't see differences at all.
I still think that painting is a way of expressing art. For example -- when you paint Christ or a landscape in an oil on canvas. But drawing is a technique used by the artist to work the figure. The melting clocks of Dali is also a good example. He painted his hallucination, and he drew the outline.
You are mistaken and I think that should have been clear from what I've written.
Quoting javi2541997
The difference between painting and drawing, as I've said, is predominately one of mediums.
Hopper's Night Hawks captures a moment in an urban diner at night. Whose story is this? The guy behind the counter? The person gazing into the diner? One of the customers? The city? We don't know what the story is, exactly; it might be humdrum boredom; might be tragedy. Or maybe the diner is a welcome respite from late night work. When I look at pictures like this I hear Aaron Copland's Quiet City.
A painting doesn't have to be figurative. "Composition X" by Kandinsky displays definite but abstract shapes against a black background. It is more like a musical composition than a photograph. I do not know what Kandinsky is communicating, but his work is definitely a "painting", probably produced in a manner not altogether different than any other painter's method--taking carefully mixed colors on a brush and applying them to a surface, perhaps over a pencil sketch, perhaps not. I'm not always sure what music is trying to communicate either.
Back in the day, say, 1900, what was art and what was not art was still maybe somewhat clear. The difference between art/not art began to break down when in subsequent decades artists started presenting "ready made" art -- Duchamp's Fountain being a famous example.
Ready Made and Found Art were a provocative objection by its creators to what "ART" was supposed to look like and mean. "If I say it is art, then it is art." They said.
"Fountain" isn't a painting -- it's an object; it could be a sculpture. Indeed, manufacturers employ sculptors to design bathroom fixtures. But a hardware store urinal isn't art, and isn't attempting to be art. It's a utilitarian object, and as such may be interesting, beautiful, very functional, or drab and uninteresting. But it isn't capturing a moment in a narrative. (It's capturing something else at the moment.)
I think a painting is a type of drawing. The medium, paint, is the most obvious and least interesting distinction.
Paintings are always aesthetically oriented, while drawings might be doodles, diagrams, even words ( which are so specialized and so woven into the fabric of life that those drawings get their own category). A painting is art by definition, a drawing may or may not be.
Paintings are prestige, high art. Drawings, far less commonly so. Kings commission paintings, not drawings. We build temples (aka museums) to honor and worship paintings, not "drawings". If the painting on your wall is not museum worthy, it is because it is "low art", not high; but, it's still on the spectrum, whereas a mere drawing may not be on it at all.
Quoting Moliere
Drawings are 2d and represent something other than the literal markings themselves. Paintings are a certain kind of drawing.
I don't think that's true. Watercolours and gouaches are generally considered to be paintings and they may be used for example in architectural design as depictions of what projected buildings or landscape gardens will look like. Are they to be considered art or not? Of course a sketch may be either a painting or a drawing depending on mediums.
Quoting hypericin
This is not true either?there are abstract drawings that are all about mark-making and composition, just as there are abstract paintings.
The meaning of "a painting" cannot be put into words, either as a definition or a description. The meaning of "a painting" cannot be said but can only be shown.
The meaning of "a painting" may be understood by looking at the objects that have been named in the following set: {Monet's "Landscape with Factories", Derain's "Houses of Parliament", Klimt "Pine Forest", Leonardo da Vinci "Lady with an Ermine", Giotto "The Betrayal", El Greco "View of Toledo", Albert Bierstadt "The Rocky Mountains", Jolomo "The Light of Argyll"}
Because the elements of the set share family resemblances, Russell's Paradox, resulting from unrestricted comprehension, may be avoided.
As Wittgenstein pointed out, the observer who looks at the objects named in this set will discover a family resemblance between these objects, and this family resemblance will be "a painting".
In order to understand the meaning of "a painting", the set does not need to include every painting ever painted, but only a sample.
As there is no "correct" meaning to any word or expression, there is no "correct" meaning to the expression "a painting". Person A looking at this set will discover a family resemblance that will be different to person B looking at the same set. Person A looking at a set 8 elements will discover a different family resemblance to a set that contains 16 elements. But even, so there will be a family resemblance between different family resemblances.
In answer to the question, what is a painting, a preliminary meaning of "a painting" may be understood by looking at the following 8 objects.
Why?
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915) explicitly does not represent anything.
Also, note that "picture" does not occur in the OP.
Quoting BC
I like that.
Not all paintings, then, are pictures.
Exactly. I like that.
A painting is made of areas. A drawing is made of edges. They both change the appearance of a surface.
A photograph is a copy of what exists in the world, and therefore depicts what is necessarily true.
A painting is a copy of what could exist in the world, and therefore depicts what is possibly true.
Primitivism is a style of art used by artists in an industrial society that duplicates the style of art used by artists in pre-industrial societies.
Photography as an invention of an industrialised society can only copy the world as it exists in an industrialised society, and therefore cannot depict the primitivism of a pre-industrial society.
Only painting can copy what the world could have been like in a pre-industrial society, and therefore can depict the primitivism of a pre-industrial society. For example, Picasso's "Portrait of Max Jacob".
More defensible is, "If we say it is art, then it is art," which can also open up interesting conversations about who is included in "we."
"What art is supposed to look like" and "what art is supposed to mean" are separate inquiries, I think, both prompted by an object like Duchamp's urinal. D's choice of the urinal as his "ready-made" was of course not arbitrary; he offers an object that is "supposed to" look like something unbeautiful, utilitarian, with connotations of disgust -- the sort of thing our culture encourages us not to look at. So, can we declare it to be art nonetheless?
The "what does it mean" question is the more lasting, and exciting. Here, any object would do, and the question applies as much to found art as to ready-mades. What does it mean, what are we saying, when we declare something to be art? Are we discovering something within that object? Or are we declaring a way of seeing, a way of regarding? I think art should be understood as something we put a metaphorical frame around, and 20th century art has shown us that that can be literally anything. The title of Danto's famous book suggests this eloquently: The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
Conceptual art pushes this even further, asking whether an "object" is even needed to reside within the frame.
That was a spellcheck error where it somehow put "not" instead of "more." You charitably read me as rational and deciphered my intent correctly. Very Davidsonian of you.
Quoting Banno
Same referent though.
I'm a huge Hopper fan.
Good/Ditto.
Don't you think this may be considered a painting as well?
Japanese Shod?.
Certainly. In the same way that Braque's "Le Figaro" includes text within its composition.
They are both paintings because they are both intended as paintings, and not intended as something like a street sign giving directions to drivers.
The same object can be an artwork and not an artwork at the same time.
For example, if the stop sign is intended as a street sign giving directions to drivers then it is not an artwork, but the moment someone says "that stop sign looks like an artwork" then it becomes an artwork.
As the saying goes "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".
Brilliant.
So this will be close to the idea that a painting is what we say it is, but with more details. I want to say that there are criteria of judgment which differentiate a painting from the wall it sits on, and that these criteria are something decided by our artworld. In some sense the expectation set by going into a museum that showcases great works defines what gets to be considered art and what does not get to be considered art.
But then that's not quite right, of course. It's just a familiar experience for anyone whose bothered to go to an art museum to draw from: there's a certain expectation of the pieces that is different from the temple it sits in. Usually the museum is considered a peice of architectural art, but how we judge a building and how we judge a painting are very different.
I'm inclined to follow along with -- "family resemblance" gets used a lot because it resolves a lot of the various counter-examples you'll inevitably capture with a strict set of criteria. I like the idea of there being a sort of paradigmatic set which we call "paintings", and from that set we can start to make some distinctions that will hold in a good enough way -- we can see why someone would say that -- while acknowledging there's likely a counter-example within the set to any proposed strict criteria.
Something like a formalism of judgment which acknowledges the difficulties in stating universal criteria for something that's probably better suited for a family resemblance.
The distinctions I'm thinking through and liking: everyone's theory on the difference between a drawing and a painting has been more illuminating that I suspected it would be: I thought the far comparisons would do better, but actually I'm enjoying these various distinctions between drawings, paintings, pictures, and art: wet/dry, High/low, warm-up/real-deal...
My point was that prior to photographic technology paintings served a similar purpose (often political).
At one point, that was accurate. But the technology rapidly advanced so that what is now presented in a photograph is as open to question as what a painter paints.
As the French say "vive la différence", or rather, as Derrida might have said, "vive le différance".
In what way is something that is a painting different to something that is not a painting?
According to Derrida, meaning is not inherent in a sign, but arises from its relationship with other signs, and where the meaning of a sign changes over time as new signs keep appearing and old signs disappear (Wikipedia - Différance)
For example, the word "house" derives its meaning from the way it differs from "shed", "mansion", "hotel", "building" etc.
For example, Derain's painting "Houses of Parliament" derives its meaning from the way it differs to the building the Houses of Parliament.
It is as much about language as it is about the language of art.
Symbols are only useful if they have an opposite. Good only means something if there is bad. Hot only means something if there is cold. Painting only means something if there are things that are not paintings, such as sculptures, photographs, music or happenings.
So what is a painting may be answered by saying that a painting is not a sculpture, not a photograph, not music and not a happening.
I have no training in art. I think there are three key elements when it comes to artwork, namely, idea, form, and media. The idea is the mental focus of the artist, which is expressed in the artwork. Form is the configuration of media that plays a role in conveying the idea between the artist and the audience. Media is material used for the artwork.
I don't buy this idea that paintings, and art in general, can be equated with narrative. Narrative rather seems like one form painting, and art, can take.
Representational painting may aim at specific narrative. More often, it is the viewer filling in narrative gaps themselves. A painting may not aim at narrative at all, it may capture the feel of a place, a time, or a mood. It may symbolize something other than what is literally depicted. With more abstract paintings, like the example you gave the idea of narrative seems pretty hopeless.
What if, art is just a human created object that is meant to be enjoyed and/or pondered, rather than merely used? So, games would be art, and this seems pretty natural to me: games, like other art, start not from a creative void, but from existing genres, which the creator then varies to their liking. Food, to the extent it is meant to do more than nourish, is art. I'm even willing to admit sex toys as art. If so, paintings are just one of many culturally defined genres or categories of art.
Duchamp showed that what is art ultimately rests on cultural context. If you take a prosaic item and place it into an art-context, it becomes art. This is not just some abstract theory, everyone directly experiences it. The urinal transforms from a thing you piss into, into something about which you ask questions like, "but what did he mean?", or say things like "that's brilliant!" or "that's ridiculous!"
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
Fair points, honestly that post was half-baked.
I think your notion of "picture" needs clarifying here -- you've stated that a picture need not be representational, and others have mostly taken you to task on "picture" because it seems to indicate a kind of representation? I think?
Either way if this is how you'll differentiate paintings from drawings -- dry and wet pictures -- it's fair to ask "So how do we identify a picture?"
Yep. I had given that a high probability.
Quoting Hanover
Not if reference is inscrutable...
Not that that's an easy distinction to distinguish.
Yes, because here we have a question about the actual composition of the object, which Danto showed was not the question concerning art tout court. I should have noted that in my post, thanks.
I'd settle for question 1 and 2. Even within one culture (perhaps artworld?) it's hard to specify the stories and circumstances of art.
Quoting Banno
I'd like to think that we haven't moved from aesthetics to art history, tho art history provides good examples to think through.
Sure!
My purpose here is to introduce philosophical thinking about aesthetics, given the amount of push-back I got in suggesting that aesthetics and philosophy are related.
But the only way to do that is to turn towards the "pure" aesthetics -- so you can see there's more to my personal interest in the matter, but perhaps you'll see what I'm talking about. But that can't be done when matters of money and such are at stake -- like the paintings in a museum -- but rather when we don't have anything to lose by our expression.
How do we judge then?
It certainly matter why we're asking -- and perhaps aesthetic judgment can be differentiated from practical judgment on the basis that we're not asking for practical reasons of action, but only for reasons of admiration, attraction, beauty, interest, etc.
O no worries. I'm glad to have you thinking along given your familiarity with Danto and how it seems intuitive to me.
This is a great question, IMO. I'll go out on a limb and say that nothing very interesting can be said about aesthetics without locating what you're saying in some kind of art-making tradition. This means either assuming, or outright providing, some art history. I agree it's not a "move from," but a way of giving aesthetic discussion something to talk about. The two discourses require each other, in order to make sense.
So this gets into something that I'm thinking about -- the semantic layer of art.
If the soft watches are a symbol, then there's something to interpret beyond "soft watches on canvas by painter dali": a deeper meaning to the art-object.
I might put doubt on a printed paper using Times New Roman saying "This is Art", but painting letters is part of art at this point.
Same
I've had the privilege of seeing his paintings in MOMA and the Chicago Art Institute.
Derrida is an interesting philosopher to bring into the mix.
One part I'd caution here though is that Derrida is not an aesthetic philosopher. There's the system of signs, yes, and art can be seen as a system of signs that define one another -- as has been present in this conversation.
Also his notion of "absence" fits very easily into discussions on art -- it's not what was said as much as what was not said, at times. The unspoken, the not-present, is meaningful.
But I do think he's focusing in on the problems of knowledge and inference given these particular thoughts on language rather than explicitly addressing aesthetic questions.
His would be a philosophy that I think I could argue as interesting if I could come up with an aesthetics of philosophy. ("interesting" in the manner that others who like philosophy ought to take him seriously)
But for now I'm trying to develop the ideas of aesthetic thinking, with respect to philosophy at least, at all.
This goes to something @unenlightened said some years ago, and it stuck with me (though of course, being philosophicalish, I resist it): Philosophy is parasitic.
Or, perhaps, symbiotic, to put it more kindly.
Not always, of course, but I agree that philosophy of art and history of art require and feed on one another in a good way. Same with science, for that matter.
So, given this tripartite distinction, what makes a painting a painting?
It's a good set of distinctions, IMO -- but I want to see them in operation.
PICTURE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
https://dictionary.cambridge.org dictionary english picture
picture
uk/?p?k.t??r/ us/?p?k.t??/
noun
a drawing, painting, photograph, etc.
an image seen on a television or cinema screen
a film
the cinema
...
verb [ T ]
to imagine something
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You are working with a restrictive interpretation of the word 'picture'. Malevich's work depicts a black square. It is a depiction of an abstract object rather than a physical object.
From Wikipedia:
In his manifesto for the Suprematist movement, Malevich stated that the paintings were intended as "a desperate struggle to free art from the ballast of the objective world" by focusing solely on form.[4]
Not all paintings capture a moment in a narrative either. Paintings may do that as may drawings.
In any case the OP specifically asked what criteria make something count as a painting, asking what is the difference between a painting and a drawing.
Quoting hypericin
:up:
Quoting Moliere
I hope what I've written above answers the question. I realize there is a conventional distinction between representational and abstract paintings and drawings, but as I said earlier I think abstract paintings and drawings are representational in a difference sense in that they represent abstract objects or images.
@javi2541997 failed to answer my question as to why he didn't think the Dali picture he used as an example is representaional. Perhaps Moliere, your notion of "picture" needs clarifying in order to identify just where it conflicts with the picture of the meaning of 'picture' I have been presenting.
I'll go over the thought again, I guess. Any definition given for art will invoke a counterplay by some artist. The act of defining art - and by association, painting or drawing or picture - stipulates a view that can be overturned.
The analogue in logic is that any axiomatic system sufficient for arithmetic will exclude some truths.
It's always open to you to stipulate that this is art, that isn't... But that'd be pretty arbitrary, and we need not accept your stipulation.
It's more fun not to.
A pretty weak restriction, if what it does is allow some paintings not to be pictures.
I'm finding this conversation a tad tedious.
I'll allow for paintings that are not pictures. If you see that as too restrictive, I don't much care. It's you who insists that Black Square is a picture as well as a painting. I think it's a black square, as opposed to a picture of a black square.
Agreed.
@Banno Can you give an example of a painting that isn't a picture? Also, are you using 'picture' differently from 'image'?
A simple division is to split paintings into the Modern, artists such as Derain, and the Postmodern, artists such as Cindy Sherman.
Typically, Modern art specifically includes the visual aesthetic and Postmodern art specifically excludes the visual aesthetic.
The philosopher Francis Hutcheson wrote about aesthetics and beauty. For Hutcheson, beauty is not in the object but is in how the object is perceived, and stems from uniformity amidst variety. Diverse elements come together in a way that feels balanced and harmonious, a dynamic process where we sense order within complexity.
If beauty is the sense of order within complexity, this can apply to more than paintings and can apply to any thought about the world, including philosophical thought.
The OP asks "What makes a painting a painting?"
When you say "aesthetic thinking", do you mean either i) philosophical thoughts that may not be aesthetic about aesthetic objects or ii) philosophical thoughts that are aesthetic about objects that may not be aesthetic?
Yes, I agree that painted letters might not be considered an art at all but rather a writing technique. Nonetheless, I read about Japanese Shod?, and most of the people who do it are regarded as artists, but the 'Shod?' itself is not considered an art, paradoxically. :sweat:
Another interesting thing: Back in the day, most of the Japanese prime ministers were very good at doing 'shod?', but folks call them 'master' rather than 'artist'. For example, Noboru Takeshita was a real master of that Japanese art (can we consider an art painting the Japanese kanji of your name?):
As explained to me, yes, we can considered it an art* because the Japanse Shod? is intended as paintings, not signs.
Edit*: and, therefore, a painting per se.
The painting is an artwork; therefore, it requires media, including canvas and the color materials used in the painting. There is also an idea presented in the painting, through the proper placement of colors on the canvas, so-called form.
Quoting Moliere
It starts with an idea in the mind of a painter. S/he then decides how to present the idea. This includes the size and form of the canvas, colors s/he is interested in, and how to place the colors on the canvas to present the idea.
Quoting javi2541997
Even Times New Roman, I would consider art, but art that has crystallized into use. The creation of Times New Roman involved innumerable choices, building off the templates of previous fonts. If you look at TNR compared to a list of random fonts (I see this for instance when I choose a font in paint.net), TNR looks quite "normal" compared to many of the others, but that is just a choice collectively made: TNR is in the spectrum of "neutral" fonts, for us, in this time. It is just like accent: "accent" is just a deviation from the dominant accent, but there is nothing privileged in the dominant accent, outside its dominance. It is just another way of speaking. Seen from 300 years ago, TNR would look quite eccentric, and hence, "artistic".
I was thinking of someone printing out "Times New Roman" in Times New Roman on 8.5"x11" paper, putting it up in art museum and claiming "that's art!" EDIT: in our time, that is.
There's a certain limit, that I do not know how to navigate (and am excited that @J is along for the ride on this thought adventure for the reason that I do not know how to navigate) to the notion of an artworld that I can imagine, but it may just look as stupid as someone saying "Modern art is bad because it doesn't look like anything, and my 3 year old could draw it"
I would say that would absolutely be art. As soon as you put it in a museum, it becomes an object to be appreciated, contemplated, and reacted to, rather than used. Even if the reaction is "This is bad because it doesn't look like anything, and my 3 year old could print it", that is a reaction to art, not to a utilitarian object. To escape this, you would have to react with something like "Why is that there? Is someone testing their printer?", but that is just a misunderstanding of its context.
In truth, the actual reaction would probably be a rolling of the eyes, because that kind of gesture has been done before, and would be seen as trite and cliche. But again, those reactions, "trite" and "cliche", are exclusively reactions to art.
Good point.
Heh, even though I put forward difference between the categorical/evaluative use of "work of art" I fall prey.
What's interesting in your point to me is that it could be a work of art, but since it's kind of already been done it's unlikely to be "baptized" into the artworld of museums.
***
Now, suppose someone were to hang the same within a local coffee shop that featured local artists. It couldn't be their first entry, but after some years of producing paintings and such the local shop for hanging local artwork decided to give it a go, with a pricetag of "$250" and everything.
There's where I'm slightly inclined to think it's not art, but a reproduction of a cliche in order to sell something that's easy to produce as a sign of sophistication -- when if we look at what they just bought we know that's stupid.
Yes, I agree. What a shame that they are not here to see it!
I think it is still art.
There are two independent axes that are easily conflated:
good art <---> bad art
art <---> non-art
"Art" is a way of interacting with an object, that is distinct from how we interact with other things. Once we interact with something as art, part of that interaction is appraisal, where we place it on the "good art" / "bad art" spectrum. But to do so is to already consider it fully as art.
It is common for people (art snobs especially) to say "that is not art!" of "bad art". But that is confusing art with quality and prestige. And that is, I think, what leads to the whole confusion of "what is and isn't art", because that judgement implies a rarefied, mystic quality that art possesses, non-art lacks, and only the refined critic can pick out.
Is it the way that the creator interacts with the object, or the way that the aesthete/viewer interacts with the object?
Quoting hypericin
You might therefore say that anything that is found in an art museum is, eo ipso, art. But this seems to overlook the fact that someone decided what is allowed in the art museum and what is not allowed in the art museum.
Quoting hypericin
If either of these things happened just as described, it would be vandalism, not art, and the person would presumably be arrested. :smile: Seriously, one individual cannot "put something in a museum." It takes some kind of collective agreement, some "we," in order to do the baptizing.
But with that said, the issue is far from solved, or even well understood. Danto's "artworld" is one way of trying to get a grip on it. The difference you mention between art as category and art as evaluative becomes important here. It's a bit more comfortable to agree that "what the artworld calls art is art" if we're not also being asked to agree that it's good art. The artworld can be wrong about that, on this theory.
So, is a local coffee shop with an interest in painting, part of the artworld? I don't have a strong opinion either way. Is there a clear line between "bad art" and "so meretricious it isn't even art but rather commercialism"? I doubt it.
Quoting hypericin
Usually, yes, but the reactor often wants to say something more by that remark. They want to say, "This isn't art at all. You're either the victim of a con job, or you're trying to con me." They're reacting from the traditional understanding of art as defined by some combination of terms like "hard to make," "reflects an ability to draw well," "beautiful/sublime/original," "requiring X, Y, Z materials and media," "the result of a single individual's unusual degree of talent," and more.
I sympathize. I like those kinds of art a lot. I think the quality percentage is often higher in the traditional forms. But if we're philosophers trying to understand what art is and what it means, we can't stick with those traditional criteria -- not unless we're also able to make a plausible case that pretty much every innovation in the Western artworld since c. 1919 has been fabulously wrong about what art can be.
Of course by "put in a museum" my meaning included all the gatekeeping. But to most of us, it is not a "we" but a "they", the art elite, who do the baptizing.
Quoting J
I wonder if you are understanding the "artworld" as the high or elite art world. I think the idea is that there are multiple artworlds, only partially overlapping. For instance, high art, graffiti art, country music, black metal music, harry potter fan fiction, philosophical essays. Each gatekeep with notions of what belongs and what does not, and what is elevated and what is not. Of course, with any of these, we are always free to disagree with what is canonized as good art.
Quoting J
Not "the artworld", but certainly "a artworld", maybe many. To say something is "so meretricious it isn't even art but rather commercialism" is just a way of condemning it as bad art.
Quoting J
Fair. But they are still evaluating it as art, and finding it lacking in some way. That is an artistic judgement. They would never think to do this of a stop sign, for instance.
Good question. Right now I am inclined to say that art is intentionally created as art by a creator. When the viewer misunderstands art as non-art, or non-art as art, that is a misfire.
Quoting Leontiskos
Why overlook? Museums, galleries, and critics function as gatekeepers of high art, and so yes, someone is doing the gatekeeping. But high art is hardly inclusive of all art. To experience an object in a museum creates a powerful pull in the viewer towards experiencing it as art. But that is just one of many ways of experiencing art.
Yes, this is right. I was implicitly importing my idea of which "artworld" would be appropriate in a discussion about a possibly-museum-worthy painting. But the thing is not monolithic, as you say, especially when we're talking popular art.
Quoting hypericin
Troublesome, for sure. Some of my favorite contemporary visual art is so-called "outsider art" or "visionary art." The standards there are very much counter to NY-gallery-type art elites. But it illustrates your point about multiple worlds: There is nonetheless a "we," an artworld, that develops a consensus around outsider art too.
Quoting hypericin
I think this is the saving grace of the whole conception. We can separate out the use of "art" as some kind of honorific or compliment, and just say, "Yeah, this particular artworld has helped us see certain kinds of things as art; now the conversation can begin about how aesthetically valuable it is."
Quoting hypericin
I could go either way on this. And of course the criticism comes in different flavors and strengths. I'm not sure whether we should call such criticism an aesthetic judgment, or a judgment about what is art. Maybe it's got two prongs: "This crap isn't art in the first place, but if you really insist on asking me to call it art, then it's terrible art." No one is offering the stop sign as an art object (usually!), but the critic is upset about the whole concept of "offering" something as art. It's this crazy pretense (from their point of view) that they object to.
Okay.
Quoting hypericin
But doesn't everyone and every group distinguish some things as art and some things as not art? In that sense is everyone a "gatekeeper" of art? Or does this just imply that "art" means something substantial, and therefore not everything counts?
Unless you want to say that every creator who intends their creation to be art imbues that creation with the ontological status of "art" whether or not anyone recognizes this ontological status, and that anyone who makes identification-mistakes is "misfiring."
I'm not convinced that something becomes art based on the creator's intention. I want to say that art is a communal practice that is vetted by a community, whether high or low. If that is right then "gatekeeping" is not bad, and is probably not even avoidable.
Most people seem to want to talk about art vs non-art. I recommend Grayson Perry's Reith lectures on that.
Is it still art if no one sees it that way (except the creator)? Should we say, "intentionally attempts to create art"?
Also, the verb "create" is very fraught in this circumstance. If we agree that the status of something as an artwork is not dependent on its physical nature, then "creating" an artwork can mean simply a consensus that declares the object to be so. Putting a frame around it, in other words. Are you OK with that construal of "create"?
I could go either way too, but the more I think about it the more I am convincing myself.
"Not art" and "bad art" are constantly confused. Both the hoi polloi and elite do this, about modern and pop art. Even though a fellow schlub calling Jackson Pollock not-art, or a beret-wearing hipster calling Kinkade not-art, might feel to them like a judgement about what art is, it can in fact be an aesthetic judgement. Since the distinction is not clear in most people's minds, they can be expected to substitute one for the other. Moreover, they likely don't even have a clear idea on what art is. So, we are under no obligation to take these declarations seriously.
Also note, "This crap isn't art in the first place, but if you really insist on asking me to call it art, then it's terrible art." doesn't work in other contexts. "This apple isn't a house in the first place, but if you really insist on asking me to call it a house, then it's a terrible house." No, it's just not a house.
"Pretense" is exactly right. Part of the problem is the offending piece is masquerading not just as art, but prestige art, exalted in museums and expensive galleries as the best of the best. But that is just an aesthetic judgement: "this art does not deserve this praise", not "this is not art". In a different context, for instance, your kid starts experimenting with drawing abstract shapes and patterns, you might instead leap to its defense as art. Also note that "pretentious" is used either on people, or on art. Hammers are never pretentious.
Quoting J
I think so. It is still an object created for aesthetic, not practical, use. Moreover, as a creator you always have a special relation to your creation, your enjoyment of it as not just art, but your art. (Or, disgust with it!)
Quoting J
I think so. For instance, some one finds a strikingly beautiful feather. They frame it, and hang it on the wall. Here, the "creation" consists in literally framing the natural object as art. I would say this is as much art as anything else. This is consistent with art not as some innate ontological status some objects have, but as a social context around some objects.
I wouldn't say gatekeeping is "bad", and art is certainly a communal practice. But I don't think community vetting can ever be a reliable arbiter of what is and isn't art.
Take Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. To my knowledge, not only was this soundly rejected by the critical establishment, but its performance even resulted in a riot. Yet now it is treated as a masterpiece. If community vetting is the standard, then it wasn't art then, and is art now, which doesn't seem right at all. And it does not leave room for the community to be wrong.
I think "art" is akin to "artifact" and "tool". An artifact is distinguished from an ordinary object by the fact it was created with intention by humans. A tool is distinguished from an ordinary artifact by the fact it was created with the intention to facilitate physical manipulation. Art is distinguished from an ordinary artifact by the fact it was created with the intention to be used aesthetically. None of these distinctions rest on some ethereal ontological essence latent in the object. Rather, they rest on the history of the object.
Good point. What should we say, then? You go on to noteQuoting hypericin Perhaps that's good enough; the distinction isn't clear, usage-wise, and it's no wonder people use them somewhat interchangeably. We could imagine more and more cases like this, using the "house" example, the closer we get to a comparison that's "in the 'house' neighborhood" -- for instance, "This hovel made of detritus isn't a house in the first place, but if you really insist on asking me to call it a house, then it's a terrible house."
If this isn't good enough (for us philosophers), then we need to recommend a more precise set of terms. I vote for something along the institutional, Danto-esque lines we've been discussing.
But . . .
Quoting hypericin
This would be an objection to an "art as consensus" model. I can't remember if Danto addresses it; I'll try to look back at some of his work and see if I can find it.
Maybe it helps if we frame the question like this: Is it possible for me to create (taken as loosely as possible) something for aesthetic use, only to discover that the "we" who generally look at such objects do not consider it art at all? That would be rare, but possible. This gets to the heart of one of the difficulties with the "artworld" model. Exactly how many "I's" does it take before we get a "we"? Presumably "consensus" doesn't have to mean 100%, but what does it mean? Evidently it needs to stop short of "only one person (the artist)," though -- and that's what you're questioning by asking if intent alone is enough to do the baptizing.
Your Rite of Spring example of a change in "community vetting" is also relevant here. And the confusion between non-art and bad art returns: That 1913 audience did not, as far as I know, castigate Stravinsky and Diaghilev for not being artists at all. The audience thought it was outrageously bad art, but they knew it was music and dance. A better example might be the reaction to Duchamp: "You've got be kidding! This is a urinal."
(BTW, there's considerable evidence that a big part of the audience's reaction to the Rite can be explained by its being such a bad performance. That score is well understood and appreciated now, but can you imagine mounting a performance for the first time?! None of the players would have heard, literally, anything like it before. "What is this supposed to sound like?" Very plausible, then, that as a performance it barely held together.)
Quoting hypericin
Good, glad you see it that way too. We have to emancipate "creation" from necessarily meaning "moving around physical stuff."
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
They are not all pictures but can all count as pictures.
Ok.
I think this is a clarifying example. You can imagine a series, from a typical house, to houses in worsening states of disrepair, to a heap of rubble. Starting from the typical house, you get houses, bad houses, worse houses, and finally non-houses. I think this is why bad art and non-art are confused: with functional objects, such series are typical. As a functional object deviates from its proper form, it gets worse and worse, because form is essential to its function, and so the functionality declines along with the deviation. Deviate enough, and it stops being functional completely, and is instead just trash.
From this perspective, it is natural to call Duchamp's Fountain non-art. It has deviated so far from the form of art, that it has lost all "art function": it isn't pretty or enjoyable to look at. It required no technical skill, anyone could have done that. It doesn't depict anything beyond what it literally is.
We are accustomed to thinking that certain types objects *are* these types of objects by virtue of the function they fulfill. But we agree that this is a mistake, when it comes to art. Any functional requirement we can come up with will turn out not to work, and we could fill a hundred pages of this thread that way. Art is not a function of an object, it is a context around an object. There is no function art must fulfill, since art is not functional, but aesthetic. It is a way of apprehending an object, not as useful, but as the subject of contemplation. Therefore literally anything is a candidate for being art.
Yet, that alone is too broad. Even though nothing is excluded from being art, merely being a potential object of contemplation doesn't make art. Everything is a potential object of contemplation. And so I still maintain, art is an object specifically created to be an object of contemplation, where "creation" can include reframing an existing piece of non-art as art. And so, there was never a point where Duchamp's Fountain failed to be art: in the bathroom, it functioned, an may never have been given a moment's consideration. Moved into the museum, it did nothing, and received no end of contemplation.
Take the "Ship of Theseus': there is no fact of the matter as to whether the ship with all its parts replaced is the same ship or not, so not an ontological, but a semantic, matter. What does exist is the ship: that's ontology.
I should have addressed this more thoroughly:
Quoting Banno
You are putting words in my mouth. I'm simply saying that all paintings can count as pictures on reasonable definitions of the terms. On more restrictive definitions all paintings may not count as pictures. I haven't anywhere said that not all paintings are pictures.
I think you went off-topic. @Moliere simply asked why we have different concepts of painting. Since the painting of a wall to a piece of art painted in oil on canvas. Why is the first not considered art but the second is hung in the museums? I guess that's the main subject of discussion in this thread...
What does ontology have to do with that?
One of a couple of central questions @Moliere asked was what is the distinction between paintings and drawings. I originally simply pointed out that the usual distinction between paintings and drawings is one of the difference between pictures produced using wet or dry mediums.
I referred to paintings and drawings as pictures and then got drawn into a side issue as to whether all paintings and drawings can be thought of as pictures, and I pointed out that it would depend on definitions of the terms, not on some presence or lack of shared essential characteristics of paintings and pictures that make it necessary that they should be thought of as either in the same category or not.
I brought ontology into it to emphasize that it is a mistake to think that there are always some essential characteristics that make it necessary that something must be thought to belong to a particular category or identity.
And this?
Is it a painted red-coloured wall?
The main difference is that the first is intended to be 'art', but the second is just decoration.
Interesting. So is art "intended"? If that were so, then the intent of the chap with the roller is what decides if the wall is art or not... We would need to ask him his intent.
Quoting LuckyR
Plainly, it isn't. A noun is a word. The red rectangle is not a word. You might argue coherently that "Rothko's red rectangle" (quotative) is a noun-phrase.
That's exactly what I personally think. We should ask the author if what he creates is art or not, apart from what we (spectators) may believe.
https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Pieter_Vermeersch/142#biography
Is that maybe a sculpture about a painting? Since it incorporates the room space to complete its portrayal?
As you are seeing it on your screen, the artwork could be a photograph, which just happens to be of a blue wall.
True.
I was imagining being in the whole room with the blue wall. The blue wall is not just a blue wall (or maybe not even a wall) - it is in a corner, highlighted, because the other wall is not blue. It could have been displayed otherwise, but was not.
I am sure a case could be made that I am not looking at things properly. And a case could be made that there is no such thing as looking at these things properly. And a case could be made that I was looking at things properly, (no matter what I said I saw, or because of what I said I saw, namely, a sculpture with a blue wall).
This is one of those perhaps odd consequences of accepting the institutional theory of art -- Van Gogh's paintings that were not known but found later were not art before they were found, even though they were painted by Van Gogh!
I'm not sure it can be a red rectangle in a mathematical sense, at least -- but if all we mean is something we see that's roughly shaped like a rectangle then I could read it as a red rectangle.
I was just wondering yesterday if someone were to paint a three-dimensional shape as part of the painting would that still be a painting? I was beginning to wonder if part of what makes paintings and drawings paintings or drawings is that they are in 2-dimensional space. Even if we take a three dimensional object and paint it: would the painting be the object underneath the paint, or the paint itself? if just the paint itself then we could still see the surface as a 2-dimensional space where the artwork lies, but expressed on a three dimensional object to point out -- perhaps -- that canvas is not a necessary feature of paintings which are art.
Which I think helps me think through the example here: The object is the wall and the desire is to change the color of the wall for this or that non-artistic reason. While there's a certain technique to doing a good paintjob -- namely in getting an even coat, unlike our sample at the moment, which doesn't draw attention to itself and seals itself well to the walls so that the paint doesn't peal -- but even the painter wouldn't say it's art (unless it was a particularly good paint job, perhaps, that they're proud of)
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On the multiplicity of artworlds:
I can see the museum and the coffeeshop as having slightly different criteria -- namely to do with whether it's canonical or not -- but they share the common artworld of painting I think.
So not just locations, but even mediums can give rise to different artworlds.
But we can't just point to it in making a family resemblance theory as if the work is over. There's still the work of specifying that family resemblance, which is surely where the debate has been more focused if we're dealing with a phenomena better thought of as a family resemblance. (i.e. it was the philosophers who were wrong to seek out universal/sufficient conditions of painting, but there's still philosophy to be done)
This is a great exposition of how and why Fountain was first seen as non-art. Watching how the conversation has evolved on this thread, I want to add something: What turned it from a urinal to one of the most talked-about and influential artworks of the 20th century was not Duchamp's intention alone. By persuading a gallery to grant it what I'd call provisional status as art, he in turn offered Fountain to the larger artworld. This offering was meant to be provocative: I say this can be seen as art. If you disagree, explain why. And as we know, the argument was resolved in his favor. Conclusion: a "ready-made" can be an art object.
Here's a similar example, to reinforce the point I want to make. John Cage's "4' 33'' " makes a similar claim about what counts as music. Beyond the amusing set-up -- "can be performed by any combination of instruments" -- Cage was really asking his audience to reconsider what silence is supposed to be, musically. There's a lot of detail I could go into, but the idea is that silence in traditional music fulfills a structural function only: It's the place where, by agreement, there is no music, such as during a whole-note rest. We're not meant to consider what might in fact be audible in the so-called silence, because that doesn't fall under either the category of "music" or the category of "composer's intention." Cage asked the audience to spend 4 minutes and 33 seconds listening to ambient sound. Seventy years later, the consensus is fairly strong: Such sound, within that "frame," qualifies as art, though perhaps not music, just as Fountain qualifies as art, but perhaps not any previously known category of visual art.
Suppose this "provisional offering" of silence/ambient sound as art had been roundly rejected. And suppose Fountain was laughed out of the gallery. Some on this thread want to say that this would not have changed either work's status as art. Duchamp and Cage knew what they were doing, they considered themselves artists, so it's the artworld's loss if these works were not appreciated as art. I know that's an attractive position, because it privileges one of the traditional components of making art: that art is an individual thing, and expresses something about the maker, and we admire originality and vision. All true. But can art really be a private language, something that only the maker can speak?
How we answer that may depend on a related question: What is/are the purpose(s) of art? On the spectrum between self-expression (personal) and communication (collective), can it "go too far" in one or the other direction? If a poem falls in the forest and there's no one there to read it, is it still a poem?
I'll stop here before I die the death of a thousand profundities! :smile:
Quoting J
I'm hesitant to justify art by its purposes. If anything I think it's entirely useless, and that's sort of the point. Rather than there being functions which art fulfills it can fulfill any function we want -- so a pot, though a useful item, can at the same time be a work of art. But in judging the pot as a work of art I am not concerned with its utility -- a pot in a museum from some ancient time is interesting because of when it was made and what it might mean for the history of art and ourselves, not because it's good at carrying water.
But that "what it might mean" is the sort of thing I think we're making up, and so it's not strictly some purpose which art serves but rather art is a human activity which we pursue for itself -- much like philosophy, and a good deal of science too.
I wouldn't want to put it in terms of self-expression(personal)/communication (collective) -- art being the sort of activity which emphasizes the importance of both in conjunct to the production of art. We're drawn to an individual artist, and we are able to talk about said individual artist due to collective understandings of the norms, which in turn serve as a basis for new creations as artists challenge those norms in interesting ways.
The final quote helps me to understand what he means by "conceptual" art because he contrasts it with "retinal" art:
[quote=Duchamp, 1964]Pop Art is a return to "conceptual" painting, virtually abandoned, except by the Surrealists, since Courbet, in favor of retinal painting... If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.
[/quote]
It seems to me that he wants interpretation -- so the story behind the artwork, the motivations around it, the whole context of the chosen/found artwork -- to offer the difference between art/not-art. So basically what we've been saying with respect to the idea of an artworld, though it seems to me that Duchamp places the "dubbing" not on the side of the committee's -- I was interested to read that Fountain wasn't displayed when it was originally submitted! -- but on the part of the artist making a choice that this is what art is: Not technique, but the act of choosing something as art to be submitted as art.
Something I wonder about this is how is retinal art not-conceptual? I'd say that he's just using different formal categories of evaluation in light of an artworld, not that the retinal painting is non-conceptual. I can ask why someone wants to put anything on an anything, and in fact must in order to speak about art at all.
It's that act of judgment that seems to me to differentiate art/not-art -- but, in being an act of judgment, it seems just as conceptual whether I'm asking "Why 50 campbell's soup cans?" or "What does Monet mean by his water lillies?"
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I can sort of see how there can be a 'brain off" way of looking at paintings; but even then it seems we have to have some conceptual machinery to even want to look at something that is a painting different from the wall it sits upon.
It is a painting on canvas that we might say depicts a red rectangle and is thus to be considered a picture or we might say it is just red paint on canvas in rectangular configuration. If something is just paint on some surface, and does not depict anything then it is just a painted surface.
There is nothing substantive in these kinds of questions? as I've said a few times now it's all in the interpretation.
Quoting Moliere
Not merely an "odd" consequence, but an absurd one. Van Gogh's works are rich, beautiful and intelligently composed images which are markedly different than anything created before.
Quoting Moliere
Things like pottery and architecture may be considered to be art, and yet serve practical purposes. An American architect called Sullivan said in an essay that in architecture "form follows function". What I think all art has in common is that it attempts to bring an idea or vision into concrete being. We might say that some modern works embody an idea or vision which is quite trivial, aesthetically speaking and that their cultural value consists only in their reflective critical relationship with what had come to be considered "the canon" in an institutionalized monolithic, linear view of art history.
I's just say that a picture is usually a representation of something, that a picture pictures something other than itself. And that art need not represent anything other than itself - as is the case for the red rectangle and so on. And that hence not all paintings are pictures.
I think this is a better approach than yours, which appears to me to collapse painting and pictures, and so lose some explanatory power.
Cezanne, the Cubists the abstract expressionist painters and others all self-consciously explored in various ways the ambiguity between paintings as patterned flat surfaces and paintings as representations of three dimension space. Your definition of picture is one, but not the only one, and not so useful as it is too restrictive in my view. But "each to their own" I guess.
That appears to be what Kazimir Malevich had in mind... his intent.
But it seems we agree.
Yes, this is insightful on Duchamp's part.
Quoting Moliere
As you say, this sounds like a good expansion of the "artworld" idea. There's room to include the artist themselves, too. As long as we agree that what makes something art is a way of seeing, not a way of making, all these further interpretations can be on the table. (Clearly the main point of contention is: Whose seeing?) And we can further insist that "seeing" retain its metaphorical meaning, that it doesn't have to be retinal, but can instead be the kind of seeing we mean when we say, "Ah, now I see!"
Quoting Moliere
OK, let's call that special way of seeing an act of judgment. And let's agree that there's no "innocent eye," no "brain-off" way of looking at paintings. Still, we need to explain the important difference Duchamp is pointing to. If I understand him, he's saying that the Warhol exists in order to stimulate thought, whereas the Monet is an object of contemplation in its own right -- or something like that. Now we need a lot of conceptual apparatus to see either of these paintings in the right way; that's not in dispute. But conceptual art uses the image in a way that traditional painting does not. The soup cans have to function as a bridge to the concept, otherwise the artwork fails. Whereas the water lilies don't insist on this kind of move.
Maybe? Just thinking out loud . . .
Being a piece of art is taking a certain place in a complicated game played with words, deeds and money.
The Murujuga rock carvings might be up to fifty thousand years old - far older than any art found in Europe.
There's no way we can enter into the intent of the artists; too long ago, too far removed from us, now...?
No frame, no museum.
It's ok, they are going to build gas export facilities over the top of them, so they won't annoy the anthropologists and art historians.
Just as a representational, in the traditional sense, paintings are pictures of whatever it is they depict, and at the same time are just painted shapes on a flat surface. I see an intractable ambiguity when it comes to visual representation.
The first statement I agree with, but not the justification. If they make bad art they're still an artist, categorically -- it's just bad art, and they are, by that standard of "bad" at least, a bad artist.
It does have to be recognizably art in some sense -- part of what makes some of these examples poignant is that their creators have demonstrated their ability to follow technique, but they're wanting to say something about art as a whole after having demonstrated their ability in the traditional ways.
Quoting Banno
Hrrm... it might depend upon further evidence, but I'm hesitant to say no way. It'd be a stretch, though, and take a lot of careful work and humility along the way (recognizing just how out there that is to try and determine the intent of someone so long ago without any evidence aside from the work itself). One thing we might say here is that we don't have a good clue what the intent was, but it seems like there was still an artist for all that -- some person a long time ago tried to do something like what we call art. What their artistic concerns were is hard to say, I'll admit, but I'd say that's more of an interpretative device that we can use rather than something which is part of what makes the painting a painting. I'd rather say it requires a creator. And perhaps an audience of 1, the artist, is enough, but I do think there being an audience is important.
But by that criteria I'd say this still fits, and is a good example of art not curated within a museum. But here we're very much left wondering much more than other artworks, of course.
Quoting Banno
Seriously? That's terrible.
Well, if you must. The idea that a black square only represents a black square looks a tad too platonic for my taste... it smells of perfect forms and such nonsense.
Quoting Moliere
What could that mean, if not that it must participate in some game in which we call it art?
There is a community who claim continuity with the Murujuga artists...
I agree with that, but then the question turns to -- what are the rules of this game? For whom and when? What does this tell us about what we think art is?
Quoting Banno
Cool -- that would add to the evidence against any skeptic, insofar that they took the institutional theory of art seriously, about its categorical placement -- "is art".
Though even if there weren't I'd still be inclined to call that art even if I was disconnected from that history -- I'd want to know more to understand, but "on its face" that looks like art to me in a fairly unproblematic manner.
Yes, definitely.
Another way to put -- or at least a different way to get to a similar idea -- the notion of aesthetic attitudes are ways of seeing-as. So we are looking at the painting as a painting: or, to not use the visual metaphor, we have judged something a painting which is different from the wall it hangs upon. We see the wall and the painting but I don't see the wall as a painting.
Quoting J
OK this helps me to wrap my brain around the idea of conceptual art better, then. It's always something I've struggled to understand -- Surrealism, Dada, Pop Art I could make sense of but whenever someone would say their a conceptual artist it simply eluded me what that could possibly mean.
What's of particular help is the contrast class -- the conceptual art is somehow supposed to be different from this "older" way of looking at the function of paintings.
My skepticism arises because of a general skepticism of concepts being separate from our ability to experience as enlanguaged beings at all. There was never an escape from the concepts to begin with, it's all conceptual art.
But then this sounds something like an overgeneralization in the face of your description here -- the classic function of painting vs. the conceptual function of painting.
Platonism not needed; it is just the idea of a black square that is being represented, an idea which can be re-presented in countless ways, just as the form of a tree or a human face can be re-presented in countless ways.
Trouble is, the custodians would not call it art.
Art is an aesthetic judgement, an object detachable from it's surrounds, to be moved, sold or exhibited, whilst this is created as an obligation to the land, inseparable from it's location, the very connection between people and land.
You say Platonism is not needed, then launch immediately into an explication of platonism.
What would they call it?
Are these paintings to be considered pictures? Are they representational?
See, perhaps, Encoding the Dreaming - A theoretical framework for the analysis ofrepresentational processes in Australian Aboriginal art
The argument there is for ongoing interpretation.
What might Davidson make of this?
It might help if you were to explain what your case is...
Here's mine: Quoting Banno
How does yours differ?
I say there is no ontological fact that determines what it is correct to say. You said I am doing ontology in saying that...and I respond again that it depends on your interpretation of the term 'ontology'.
The Davidsonian point that we all agree about most things is true when it comes to everyday stuff. Not so much when it comes to aesthetics.
Not so sure. But a discussion worth having.
What might a Davidsonian aesthetic look like?
An interesting statement. I am bent to think every painting is a picture, as ever 'image' is a picture. Of what, is an interesting thought.
Conclusion.
If "A picture captures a moment in a narrative", and some paintings do not capture moments in a narrative, then not all paintings are pictures.
I imagine that you would probably be in a far better position than I to give an account of that.
Again I think it (obviously) depends on how you define the term 'art'. I am predisposed to think that examples of good visual art have colour and tonal and textural relationships that form strong, resolved and unified, compositions. Many works of visual conceptual art are not much or even at all concerned with aesthetics, but rather with conveying some idea or other.
The reason I state this is partially due to what was mentioned previous regarding the Noun and Verb of the term 'paint'. The problem I see is that literally anyone can view anything with an 'artistic' eye, yet that does not make the item under inspection a 'piece of art'.
Let me explain further. A mountain can be beautiful, yet it would be bizarre to call it a 'piece of art'. A building, architecural design, may possess some unintentional beauty beyond its primary function, just like a painted fence. A fence painted a particular shade and tone may in-iteself not be at all artistic, yet along side the composition of the surrounding area may highlight aspect that draw the eye more readily to it.
As you can see there are nuances here, but neverthless I state that Art must contain aesthetic quality or it is not art. Even a mathematician can refer to the 'beauty' of a formula, but this is quite abstracted from a more pure sensory experience. With conceptual art the aesthetic is stripped clean away and what we are left with is something more akin to a rational metaphor. Again, here I can see how it can be argued that there is 'aesthetics' within this, in terms of the cleverness and juxtapositional placing of the work in question to express an idea, but the primary focus is on a rational idea, a philosophical stance, and the aesthetic of the work is deemed utterly irrelevant.
Example: Someone stole a plant from France, brought it back to the UK and emailed the gardens telling them what she had done. She then displayed the plant and the email exchange in a gallery.
My interpretation of this: It is a political action that gets people to think about ownership but there is absolute nothing aesthetic about this. It is certainly an interesting way of drawing attention to something, but what is being focused on is intellectual ideas not aesthetics qualities. That said, I am not at all suggesting that Artwork cannot possess intellectual content (far from it!), my point is that Artwork is not primarilt focused on the intellect, so I would describe what people call 'conceptual art' as more in line with a philosophical endeavor - which is why people here may disagree.
There is a differenece between an artistic eye and an artistic work. Both deal with aesthestics and emotion above raw intelect and rationality.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde for the millioneth time, Art is useless.
On the other hand, perhaps artworks need to looked at "properly" if they are to make sense.
Today, as a simplification, we can say that there are two main approaches to painting, Modern and Postmodern. The Modern is drawing attention to the aesthetic within the modern world, such as Georges Braque, and the Postmodern is drawing attention to the social situation within a postmodern world, such as Damien Hurst.
These are two very different approaches to the artwork.
Problems arise if Modern artworks are looked at from the perspective of a Postmodernist viewpoint, or Postmodern artworks are looked at from the perspective of a Modernist viewpoint.
In this sense, looking at an artwork "properly" means looking at an artwork as it was intended by the artist. If intended by the artist as a Modernist artwork it should be looked at within the domain of Modernism, and if intended by the artist as a Postmodernist artwork it should be looked at within the domain of Postmodernism.
They are here. There are also transcripts for each episode. (I find it's often best to search from outside the BBC website.)
The question why is a painting not a sculpture is the same kind of question as asking why is a play not a film or why is a cat not a dog.
If something is a domesticated mammal and a subspecies of the gray wolf then it it is a dog and if something is a small, domesticated carnivorous mammal that is commonly kept as a pet then it is a cat.
If something is performed by live actors then it is a play and if something is a recording of live actors then it is a film.
If something is an artwork in 2D then it is a painting and if something is an artwork in 3D then it is a sculpture.
There is a human need to divide the observed world into smaller parts using language. This helps the human make better sense of their observed world. As Derrida pointed out, part of the meaning of a word derives from what it is not.
===============================================================================
Quoting Moliere
The man paints a wall red. How do you know what is in his mind?
===============================================================================
Quoting Moliere
As of 1 January 2025, there were about 8,250,423,613 different artworlds, in that it seems true that no two people have identical minds. As they say, the world exists in the head.
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Quoting Moliere
Yes, even if we agree that there is a family resemblance between André Derain's "Henri Matisse" (1905) and Georges Braque's "The Harbour" 1906, this doesn't explain why there is a family resemblance.
As a first step, the "why" can be put into words. The Tate writes:
There is much that can be said.
But sooner or later, some words cannot be described using other words, such as "Wild loose dabs" or "fierce brushwork". The meaning of words such as "wild" and "fierce" cannot be said but can only be shown.
And they can only be shown as family resemblances.
It is the intrinsic nature of the brain to be able to discover family resemblances in what it is shown, and this ability is beyond any philosophical explanation
The problem is that Grayson Perry does not seem to give his opinion as to what art is, other than saying what art could be.
https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/transcripts/lecture-1-transcript.pdf
"The painting on the wall, named, can be described in the following ways... (10 pages later)" is True IFF The painting....
That's been one of the questions I've been trying to answer in talking with @J; there's the sense in which I know there's something there, because it's been there for a long time. It's art so even if we say people were "bamboozled", it's still this phenomena that, like it or not, one must contend with when doing philosophy of art.
If we exclude it then what does that say about other works of art? On what basis are we including?
For my part I take the stance that there's something I'm missing. I've gone to plenty of modern art museums out of curiosity, and some of the installations/videos/etc. really just left me mystified. I was willing to look just to see, but sometimes I sort of just shrugged.
Which usually means I'm missing something -- what is it about this that so many other people like that I'm not seeing?
I think that is right in the sense that, in order to see what the artist is showing, it often helps to know what the artist intended to show.
But I would add that there are works of art that declare much in themselves, demanding the viewer react - music can do this. Dance can do this. A poem can do this. But any type of art can require more instruction to orient the viewer and deepen the experience with the artwork.
Quoting I like sushi
That sounds to me like a new type of art! But I know what you mean. Interestingly, Danto talked a lot in his later writings about art within a particular culture as "discovering its own identity" or meaning. He compares it to Hegel's Spirit. He blurred the line between art and philosophy. For him, a work of art can be a piece of philosophy as well, it can teach us something specifically philosophical -- so a philosophical sortie, if you like.
Quoting Moliere
I've had this experience too. Part of me wants to put on my Philistine hat and say, "Enough is enough! This looped video of a woman sucking her toes simply isn't art. The artworld is wrong about this." If I resist that impulse, as I believe I should, I could also say, "Yes, I'm able to engage with this work in the Space of Art, I'm willing to accept the invitation to that special sort of seeing that art requests. Having done so, I judge it to be not very good or interesting art."
At this point, the questions about "What am I missing?" become relevant. Can I honestly say that I know enough, am experienced enough, in the particular milieu or conversation in which this art-object exists, in order to be entitled to an aesthetic judgment? If my answer is yes (as it often will be in an artworld I have a lot more expertise in, such as music or literature), then so much the worse for the art object -- but again, this doesn't jeopardize its status as art. If my answer is no (as is likely with conceptual and other post-modern visual arts), then it's on me to get educated, if I care enough.
And one more factor: Do I like it? This is a dimension where I've really noticed changes over the years. Perhaps because I have tried to better understand and experience some of this unfamiliar artworld, I more and more find that there's a sort of primitive, pre-judgmental delight I feel when exposed to (some) conceptual art. It is not at all the same delight I associate with Monet. But once I get over the "hermeneutics of suspicion," and allow the object to just suggest whatever it suggests -- call it a charitable intepretation! -- it's a lot easier to get a kick out of it.
Looking at Lecture 2 I like the "checks" which he provides for whether something gets to count as art or not, in the categorical sense.
Copying them succinctly from the transcript of Grayson Perry's second lecture:
1. "So the first marker post on my trawl around the boundaries is: is it in a gallery or an
art context?"
2. "My second boundary marker: is it a boring version of something else? ...one of the most insulting words you can call an artwork is decorative."
3. "Okay, next boundary marker: is it made by an artist?"
4. "Next boundary marker: photography. Problematic"
5. "Now this brings us on to an interesting other boundary post, which can be applied to
other artworks as well as photography, and that is the limited edition test."
6. "Another test that perhaps sounds facetious I have is what I call the handbag and
hipster test... you know you might say it belongs to sort of
privileged people whove got a good education or a lot of money, and so if those
people are kind of staring at it, theres quite a high chance that its art."
7. "Right the next test I have here, the next boundary post on our trawl around the
boundary, is the rubbish dump test. (Fx: whip) Now this is one of my tutors at college.
He had this one. He said, If you want to test a work of art, he said, Throw it onto a
rubbish dump. And if people walking by notice that its there and say Oh whats that
artwork doing on that rubbish dump, its passed. "
8. ". But anyway this test is lets call this one The Computer Art Test. ... You know it might be art rather than just an interesting website when it has the grip
of porn without the possibility of consummation or a happy ending."
And I found his concluding remark interesting -- a certain self-awareness about what people "fear" in the idea of conceptual art.
Verbal nouns inevitably lead to ambiguity. But in this case the answer is relatively easy. A painting is that which is painted, the combination of paint applied to medium.
I like it. It is just not Art. That is my primary point. Anyone can call something 'art' but that does not mean it is. I have seen the same thing in poetry too to some extent where people write a single word and call it a poem. No! It is not a poem. Is it interesting and trying to get a point across? Perhaps, but that does not make it a poem. The same goes for most 'conceptual art'.
Maybe it would be better to refer to such works as spandrels. They do not occupy the space known as Art, but they fill in some structural gaps - in a very loose analogous sense - between how the intellect can inhabit space and how aesthetics can.
Quoting J
I am not saying it cannot. An example like the one I gave I would never call Art though. I found the ideas she was trying to express wholly philosophical. There was nothing about a random plant and several printed emails stuck on a wall that I find emotionally moving in any way shape or form.
Quoting I like sushi
I would likely have the same reaction, if I saw this work. But are you open to the idea that emotional response is not criteriological? That objects aren't divided into "art" and "non-art" based on whether they are emotionally moving to someone?
I guess this connects with this as well:
Quoting I like sushi
What I learn from 20th century art is that general, semi-definitional statements like this can't hold water. There's simply too much artwork doing too many different things, in endless combinations of visual, intellectual, conceptual, and emotional dimensions! It's the Wild West! -- and enormous fun.
The only way we can make categorical judgments about what kind of thing can be art, or what kind of experience art must engender, would be to challenge the description I just gave as a description of art. We could declare war, in effect, on the artworld, and offer an explanation for why it has been so misguided for so long in what it deems art. I know there are a few critics willing to try this, but the collateral damage is immense, and I've never found the conception convincing anyway.
Again, none of this is about quality. It seems quite possible to me that the plant-and-email artwork is simply poor art. But I'd have to see it.
100% NO. If a work is not emotionally moving it is absolutely not art. There is no exception.
That is not to say every emotional instance has to be artistic or art led.
Quoting J
I think this is where you are quite simply wrong. There has to be a line drawn somewhere, and this is where I think people get confused. There is a huge difference between looking upon some object with an artistic eye and an actual artwork.
If you want to see it just look at your desk or a wall. If we are callign literally everything 'art' then the term has no practical use. Also, it is a mistake to confuse an elegant idea for a beautiful image, simply because we are used to framing those words without a similar field of context.
It just takes some careful thought across all mediums of art to see what it is and what it is not. White noise is not art, but white noise can be used in a muscial composition to excentuate this or that rhythm by punctuating what is harmonious and musical with what is not. 'Conceptual art' is this kind of White noise. On its own legs it is an artless amalgam of atomised items put to use to express an intellectual thought. A true piece of art 'moves' people not merely stimulates them to 'think' and/or um and ah about something clever.
Quoting I like sushi
So do you have a story, or explanation, for what happened to (so-called, in your view) art in the 20th century? Why were the lines not drawn where you clearly see them? Are you suggesting that the artworld did not see those lines, though they were clear, or that they saw them but disregarded them? Just trying to understand how to fit your view into a historical narrative.
At this point, the question is difficult to ask. Duchamp showed that anything can be visual art, Cage that anything can be audible art. Therefore, art is not something intrinsic to the object, but rather how the object is put to use.
I have a large collection of music I wrote but never did anything with. Is it still art, if no one else ever hears it? I think so; despite being unheard, there is an artworld it readily plugs into, were it heard. It would unproblematically be accepted as art (good art is another matter).
But what about your case? Something for which there is no artworld to accept it? Here, the creator relates to it as art, no one else does. Is it art? I think there is nothing more to say than
The creator relates to it as art, no one else does.
Whether that counts as art, to you, is just definitional. The reality remains the same either way.
People do not generally spend useful money on useless things. Yet, the art industry (inclusive of Pop art) is booming, as always. Art is full of purpose: to stimulate thinking, expand perspectives, gain insight, to entertain, to feel, to beautify spaces, to occupy idle time.
The difference is that it has no pragmatic purpose. Take a piece of purported art, and subtract away the pragmatic purpose: what remains, if anything, is the art.
In general tools modulate the world while art modulates the viewer.
Concerning purposes involving other people, I agree that most art doesn't have to be understood that way, though many artists value communication as a goal very much. But "entirely useless"? That seems to say that if I create an artwork, it's useless even to me, even as a process. Do we have to be that rigorous about it?
Quoting hypericin
OK, sort of what I meant above about "purposes for other people." And I think it's 99% true. But as always, we can find interesting exceptions. Satie claimed that his "furnishing music" was strictly pragmatic -- it was meant to add to the decor (great quote from him on Wikpedia: "Furnishing music completes one's property"). This sounds like he wanted it understood as non-art, but no one agrees!
Quoting hypericin
Yes. This intuitively reasonable position has to be accounted for by an institutional or artworld theory of art, and it's not easy. I think we need some discrimination between the artworld's role in "baptizing" individual works within a recognized tradition, versus its role as a consensus-builder around new approaches and problematic examples, like Fountain. I haven't worked out anything like this, though I think it's on the right track. We want to be able to say confidently that your un-listened-to music doesn't require a listener (or an artworld) for it to count as music -- which already counts as art. The artworld's function here came earlier, so to speak.
Maybe a good question is: Is there a risk of some art being a private language, something only the artist speaks? Or are we just frightening ourselves with extreme hypotheticals?
I agree with all of this.
Where I say I don't connect I rather put the fault on my viewing of the artobject, though sometimes I have to say "Well... I can't see anything else, so if forced to say what I think now..."
But then there are artobjects that I would not have considered before due to this permissiveness which doesn't care about the definition as much as the particular work of art itself -- which seems much better overall for a creative artworld.
Some of my skepticism derives from the monetary value, tho that's in a very idealistic sense. That art is exchanged on the market for such and such a value means that such and such an artwork is equivalent to such and such an amount of linen, at least in a Marxist analysis. So the artwork as an object of value-accretion is undeniable due to the mechanism of capital -- since there's a market a bank can easily invest in a few artobjects of a paltry million dollars or so.
But then -- at least since the Rennaissance, tho there are more controversial arguments available -- artproduction, in the "Western" world at least, has often depended upon a wealthy class which finances people who do art, whatever that is.
Quoting J
No. (EDIT: to the last question -- we do not have to be that rigorous about it)
Even in philosophy, no.
In a way it's an ideal to me -- but really I'm always interested for some reason :D
I think that people have lost the ability to see things outside of it's "usefuleness" sometimes. Not really if you mention it, but that's such a frequent default for evaluating something worthwhile that I've become disgusted with it, in a way.
Not in the broadest sense, but generally -- "Well, if it's not useful, then it's worthless!" -- no! No no no!
But of course artists, and philosophers, can and must choose varying degrees of "usefuleness", or whatever aesthetic quality they're pursuing.
I disagree with premise 1 -- I think people spend money on all manner of useless things. Tarot readings? Cigarettes? Kellogs Frosted flakes?
The industry is worth a lot, for sure. But that's not necessarily a good thing, or an indication towards its use. I'd hazard that the accreted value within those artworks will, in the worst climate scenarios, decline so drastically that they'll be found to have been bad investments -- in the long run.
EDIT: But I ought say that tho art is full of purpose -- which I agree with -- that's not the thing that makes a painting a painting. A painting need not have purpose. It need not be a good investment, or useful for anything at all. We look for uses for art, but a lot of them really don't have a use -- yet are art for all that.
How do you get to that point? Assertion, or do you have an argument?
I'm not sure I like it(EDIT: conceptual art as a whole) -- I'm arguing on the categorical side that it is art, good or bad.
Quoting RussellA
I disagree with that assertion -- but I don't want to get into it here because I refuse to do yet another realism/anti-realism diversion.
Not metaphysics, but aesthetics(or Axiology, as the tripartite division was taught to me: axiology/epistemology/metaphysics) is first-philosophy here.
Quoting RussellA
Sure!
Them family resemblances can be further specified through showing.
After that, they can be said with more relevant meaning.
You still standing by that one?
Asking here because I suspect that this is an intuitive belief held by many -- in some sense art must engage the emotions, transcends the intellect, is beyond the sensual in its proper way in that it allows us to feel the sensual as sensual in various capacities.
The philosopher in me will say "Well.. since you done said that it seems we can reason about it. And I'm very certain that what we just watched, which involved us emotionally, did not involve them at all -- so is it art?"
Open question there -- how do you resolve those differences in experience of art, given your strong stance that if a work is not emotionally moving it is not art?
I'm thinking of B-Horror movies here -- there's a select few who enjoy them, but...
It is absurd.
That's why I bring it up: the institutional theory of art solves many questions we might have about art, and while doing so reveals things about what makes art art that we would not have considered before.
But when we get strict -- unlike artists do, but like philosophers do -- we might reflect upon the aesthetics of the oddity -- that perhaps this general theory is merely general, and not predictive.
Quoting Janus
I'd follow along with your thought -- though only on the pretense that it's one of the aesthetic ways of bringing sense to art.
In the end -- well, you know artists. They'll figure out a way to dismantle the thought, given time. And won't even have the courtesy of telling you how.
It seems a very dour usage to call everything unpragmatic "useless". All these things may be unpragmatic, but they all serve needs.
By "art industry" I was mainly referring to the entertainment industry, which is exclusively in the business of producing art (I'm assuming we are past "mass art isn't art"). It seems odd to say that a multi trillion dollar global industry consists in creating useless things. Games are useless? Novels are useless? Music is useless?
I don't see this as an exception at all. Decor serves no pragmatic function, it is perfectly possible to live in an abode with no decor at all. Decor serves only to modulate the emotional state of the inhabitant; this is thoroughly, unproblematically art.
Frankly, Im ready to abandon all this talk of "artworld" entirely, and institutional theories of art. It seems oriented around the question of "what is fine art" rather than "what is art". Perhaps this was the interesting question in Danto's day, but today, to me at least, it seems far too elitist. What separates "fine art" from everyday art frankly doesn't seem as philosophically interesting as what separates art as a whole from non art.
Quoting J
Politics, technology, economics and numerous other items. Pretty sure you can extrapolate from the dynamic changes over the past century and a half that there has been substantial changes in how societies function and interact on a global and local scale. Art is part of the human exchange and experience so will necessarily reflect these changes in some form or another (some even believe art preempts these changes).
Quoting J
I am pretty sure they were drawn by many and over human history have been something of debate and interest. The difference in the current era is likely more about the rate of change due to the numerous factors briefly outlined above.
Quoting J
I was not suggesting either. Since you have brought the historic lens into play here I would probably say yes to both. Some did see, some didn't. Some did disregard them, some didn't. Again, my emphasis on this historical perpsective would be on the rate of change.
Quoting J
Hopefully that sketches out roughly what I think about the historical aspect?
I will have to think about how to answer this more fully. It is a deeply serious question and there is a deeply serious response (I will avoid the word 'answer'). Hopefully I can articulate this more by responding to your other points. Hopefully!
Quoting Moliere
Yes. The only caveat being that I fully understand this is not a binary item. It is a gradable item. I am by no means stating that I regard ALL conceptual art as non-art because some of it has aesthetic qualities to it that are parallel to paintings, poetry, etc.,.
In further opposition someone might argue that many other human experiences involve 'being moved' and therefore they are art too. That is not what I am saying either.
To get to the initial question you asked I think it is precisely this kind of Venn diagramic thinking that misses the point. The quantities are not legiable intellectually, yet the message within some artwork can certainly provoke intellectual thought and contemplation.
Quoting Moliere
The question is the degree to which we can reason about that serves our purpose.
Quoting Moliere
Experience; meaning perspective and exposure. Everyone is different and tastes vary. Nothing extraordinary about this.
Something is not Art to someone if it does nothing for them. This is purely about the artistic eye rather than the artwork. When I say the majority of 'conceptual art' is not Art I say so not due to my artistic eye -- and admittedly I could change my mind in the void between the non-existent terms of Art and Non-art in the purest sense -- rather I am looking at the intent and purpose of the work not judging it based on taste.
The real life example I gave of the plant and emails is precisely what I mean by the Work being about the Concept and wholly absent of aesthetic qualities. It does not move the observer, it only makes them think about the rationality of the item/s on display. It is not Good or Bad, it is making a point only not expressing anything on a level of emotional intensitive beyond the mundane.
IF a conceptual Work really reaching into someone and insensifies a previously mundane experience, then it is shifting towards Artwork.
I have even gone into the whole area of the different mediums of Art and my thoughts on how static art and temporal art moves people in different ways in respect to space and time. I can explain that further, not sure if you recall what I said about this before? As examples, paintings and sculptures are static while poetry and dance is temporal. The former is captured in a static moment yet can be perceived spacial in differing ways (a talented artist will lead you through a piece of artwork) expanding beyond its singular definition, whereas the latter is experienced across time from beginning to end (a talented artistic will also capture you in static moments) contracting the temporal space into an emotional singularity. We can look into various mediums such as film, music and various combinations and genres much, much more deeply to gain understanding of this too.
Here it becomes more apparent what conceptual work is doing. It is clearly working to provoke thought above and beyond feeling. We are being asked to understand it either by stretching it out or by reducing it down (depending on the medium).
A static conceptual work (object) sits still for us to observe. We contemplate it and analysis it with a dull sense of aesthetic sensibility at best.
A static Artwork does not sit still, it encapsulates feelings and carries us with them.
What makes it Art for you then?
Quoting Moliere
I would say it is the intellectual exporation rather than its aesthetic appeal - because there is no sensorial beauty or emotional movement.
I think if we just believe what people say (ie. "It is Art!") then there is a problem. A plea to our own ignorance does nothing to reveal what the reasons are for them holoding the stance that all conceptual work is actually artwork.
Someone placing a crucifix in a jar and filling it with their own urine is more or less a poltical statement of sorts that encourages people to engage with theological views, views on Art and aesthetics and could even be an example of the human use of symbols and icons in modern society. All of this is intellectual at its heart; and possibly an interesting exploration of religious life and secular life. If it shocks or provokes negativity then there is emotional movement, but I would look upon such reactions as being inflicted on the person rather than being experienced wholesale. The viewer, if appalled, is not in emotional engagement, they are looking upon the item as a piece of propaganda.
One could argue that this is still emotionally engaging the viewer, so it is Art in some respect. I could agree with the point that it 'moves' the viewer, but I would still not call it Art as many things can move people. It was produced to be viewed, yet the emphasis is strongly upon the intellect rather than taking someone on an emotional journey. I have no real issue with people disagreeing the finer points, but I have issues if people insist upon Art being Art where it lacks reasonably prominent emotional content.
A Modernist artwork may be defined as any object real or imagined that has no utilitarian purpose that has been observed or thought about by a human as an aesthetic, which is about a sense of order within complexity.
A Postmodernist artwork may be defined as any object real or imagined that has no utilitarian purpose that has been observed or thought about by a human as a metaphor for social concerns, which is about the collapse of grand narratives leading to plurality and fragmentation.
Modernism and Postmodernism
Step one. Any object real or imagined, such as a hammer or Voldemort
But, objects like hammers are thought of as utilitarian rather then art. Therefore remove any utilitarian purpose to the object and just consider the hammer in the absence of having any purpose
Step two. Any object real or imagined that has no utilitarian purpose
But, if such an object has never been observed or thought about by a human it can never be an artwork
Step three. Any object real or imagined that has no utilitarian purpose that has been observed or thought about by a human
But, even so, this doesn't mean that the human observing or thinking about the object treats it as an artwork.
From now, there are two different directions, Modernism and Postmodernism.
Modernism
It only becomes an artwork if the human responds to the aesthetics of the object. Note that an aesthetic response can be of beauty, such as Monet's "Water lilies", or can be of ugliness, such as Picasso/s "Guernica".
Step four. Any object real or imagined that has no utilitarian purpose that has been observed or thought about by a human as an aesthetic.
But what is an aesthetic. Francis Hutcheson amongst others describes it as a sense of order within complexity.
Step five. Any object real or imagined that has no utilitarian purpose that has been observed or thought about by a human as an aesthetic, which is a sense of order within complexity.
Postmodernism
It only becomes an artwork if the human responds to the object as a metaphor for social concerns.
Step six. Any object real or imagined that has no utilitarian purpose that has been observed or thought about by a human as a metaphor for social concerns.
But what are social concerns. Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote about the collapse of grand narratives leading to plurality and fragmentation.
Step seven. Any object real or imagined that has no utilitarian purpose that has been observed or thought about by a human as a metaphor for social concerns, which is about the collapse of grand narratives leading to plurality and fragmentation.
Yes, roughly. Is it appropriate for me to ask into some specifics? (You don't have to pursue this with me if it's a pain in the neck.)
Quoting I like sushi
I'll take "current era" to mean the era in which something like Fountain, or the plant-and-email piece, could be considered art.
Quoting I like sushi
To me, this implies that there's a sort of counter-artworld, or shadow artworld, in which works like Fountain are not considered art. Is that what you mean? My question was meant to focus on consensus, on why conceptual art, understood in the broadest terms, is now accepted by the artworld as an important type of art. On your view, this would have been a mistake. So how did this mistaken consensus carry the day? I guess I'm asking if you could be more specific about "rate of change" and the other factors you mention. What do you think actually happened when, say, Warhol offered his "Brillo Box" as art, and the artworld, at first reluctant, came to agree?
I'm assuming that neither of us would be satisfied with the "My kid could paint that" response. You don't think that gullible gallery owners were hoaxed by mischievous and rapacious loft-dwellers wearing berets -- or so I assume. So what did happen?
Not at all. Hopefully not derailing the thread.
Quoting J
The last century or so. The shift has picked up momentum with the advent of globalisation and technological developments.
Quoting J
I am not at all interested in talking about some abstract Art World.
Quoting J
Maybe it is by The Art World, but there are people who do not regard a lot of conceptual art as art. Roger Scruton is one prominent example.
Do you think the concensus in the street would be the same? If you asked the average joe to to say what is or isn't art would they agree that a urinal is?
Quoting J
I do not think it has. I think more than anything abstract artwork riled some people, but then they came around to it, and then conceptual work did a similar thing. The difference with conceptual work is that it is often nothing to do with art as it is an intellectual exercise (very fascinating but not art).
Brillo Box is something that does something quite unique and is a better example of a work that straddles both areas. It reveals beauty in the mundane and presents how common day-to-day trappings can bleed into pop-culture giving higher value to something often less appreciated.
Perhaps to understand what I mean you would not call a single sentence a novel, nor a paragraph nor a page. You could write something that resembles a novel on a page perhaps, but in sentence I doubt it (unless the sentence is a page long!). This shows how there is a poitn where something is or is not art, and I frame this in regards to the weight of emotional engagement.
Anyway, baby playign up. Later :)
Is this right? Can't utilitarian objects also be understood as art? Think of works by William Morris, for example, or Greek Attic vases. And then theres conceptual art.
I can see it that way. "Pragmatic" can be understood in a variety of senses.
Quoting hypericin
This is really interesting to me. I'm going to try to write an OP that will go into some of this in more detail; we've already hijacked @Moliere's thread for too long! Been rereading a lot of Danto and have noticed some nuances in what he's saying that might make sense of the whole "fine art" question. For instance, in his essay "The Art World Revisited" he disavows a strict "institutional theory" interpretation, which he calls "a creative misunderstanding of my work by George Dickie." And he says we need "a set of reasons" for why something is art, not merely a baptizing by some in-group.
Quoting I like sushi
You raise the same concern here as @hypericin: Are we being too parochial in caring what a designated artworld might think?
In general, I read you as wanting to set up some criteria to divide art from non-art, based on audience response. This is a different strategy from using criteria based on the object itself (what is it made of, who made it, how difficult was it, etc.) but shares the idea that art can be discovered. This idea is what Danto and others question, as do I, but maybe I'll go into that some more in another post.
:up:
I'm pretty much in favor of an institutional theory of art -- though my notion of "institution" is wider than "museum".
By my thinking on that theory -- Duchamp's Fountain did not quite make the cut to art in his time, though I think it admirable he didn't influence others' judgments on the matter in the committee he was a part of. But then it did after the notion of "conceptual art" became a part of the artworld. (this all very off the cuff -- I'm not an art historian, I'm reading wikipedia while thinking aloud with friends) -- the Stieglitz photograph and the sort of late appreciation of Duchamp is what makes it part of the artworld such that Duchamp could even be seen as a sort of ubermensch of that artworld.
"conceptual" as defined against "retinal" art -- very much in reaction to the traditional notions that art must adhere to such and such on pain of being not-art.
Categorically: if it's in a museum of art as an artobject then it's art. LIke it or hate it, it's in the museum. And some conceptual art ends up there too. So, like it or hate it, it's part of the category, and so can serve as a counter-example to any descriptive theory of art that refuses it unless that descriptive theory of art justifies its exclusion.
I tend to agree. The debate about what counts as art seems largely pointless. It's more interesting to talk about what is influential or vital art, versus what is forgettable, while recognising that all of this is contingent on values and tastes. If it's presented for aesthetic appreciation, it's probably art.
The debate about what deserves to be called art is a kind of gatekeeping, based on the idea that for something to be art, it must be exceptional. But art can be dull or shit and still be art.
I'd rather say that it's dour to insist that what serves needs must be "useful"
I'm doubtful of the aesthetics of use as a justification for why to include this or that artwork. "serving needs" is OK enough, but I'm hesitant due to it looking like the same structure of justifying art due to it being useful for this or that.
Not really -- they have uses. I want to separate those uses from their aesthetic value, though. At least in order to consider something aside from use in evaluating something as a work of art.
I'm all for the wider artworld -- games, novels, music, whatever -- I just don't think it's valuable due to its use, or would rather shy away from the uses of art towards the reasons we're attracted to it.
No I am not. This is one facet of art. My view is based on the artists intent, the audience, the effect on people who view and produce art, and looking upon items with an artistic eye.
Brillo Box can be seen as something like someone noticing something in nature and framing it is a certain way to show it to people. The primary point of Art is to make an emotional connection.
An institute is a poor example of the essence of something. It is open to nefarious political manipulation, not something in the Public Sphere. If you want to cage an animal you can it behave in very predictable ways. Art is like an animal and to frame it as some institutional item is frankly ridiculous.
I actually deleted a paragraph earlier but now I think it is appropriate to mention this straneg habit people have of using an individual lens to view nebulous ideas. I am not looking at this from ONE position. I have considered many items and my complete answer woudl be an amalgam of many things. A one view only perspective is a terrible approach when it comes to understanding anything with any reasonable depth. I have mentioned ONE primary criteria of many.
Edit: Meaning I think it is not simply about the audience or the artist, it is about both and the relations between. In some sense any institutionalisation of Art is moving the experience away from the human experience. In the Art World critics of across every medium of Art have voiced disapproval only to change their minds due to the majority. The question is then how much of this is pandering to popular opinion and how much is genuine in the critique of Art. The critique of Art is parallel to Art in general. It is a rationalisation of a highly irrational realm. This is where the problems arise in asigning value to a work as Art or Non-art.
With technologies such as photography Art seeps into other mediums. We should not confuse the variety of mediums as expressing anything other Art.
My first response to the OP was to consider the tools we use. The drawing is more closely related to writing apparatus, whilst a paintbrush is historically associated with replicating images, both realistically and abstractly.
I would say that there are two communities here, namely the one which rejected it and also the one which accepted it. You seem to have identified the one which rejected it as the community and then inferred that the status of Rite of Spring is therefore not communal. This seems to ignore the second community in question.
Quoting hypericin
Well, they rest on the intention of the creator, and that intention bears on the ontology of the object qua history. But the whole question turns on what it means "to be used aesthetically." For example:
Quoting hypericin
Why is "modulating the emotional state of the inhabitant" not a pragmatic function? This is but one example of the way in which the meaning of "aesthetic use" is elusive. It is also, I think, an indication that the dichotomies being proffered do not hold up when is comes to aesthetics, unless we want to say that aesthetic experience ceases to be aesthetic experience once it recognizes itself self-consciously and seeks itself "pragmatically."
For the Medievals the crux is that goodness and beauty interpenetrate, and in particular it is the fact that the beautiful is to be sought and enjoyed. We could think about the "pragmatic" as what is a means to an end, and art appreciation as an end in itself, but beyond that the two concepts will interpenetrate (and a schema which strongly divides means from ends will lack plausibility).
Yes, an object may be both beautiful and utilitarian, such as William Morris wallpaper. But these properties are independent of each other. The beauty of the wallpaper does not affect its function of covering over a wall, and it fulfils its function of covering over a wall whether or not it is beautiful.
A utilitarian object can also be artistic, but a utilitarian object doesn't need to be beautiful in order to be utilitarian.
Conceptual art is part of Postmodernism and Postmodernism specifically excludes the beautiful in its rejection of Modernism.
In what sense is conceptual art intended to be either beautiful or utilitarian?
Well, I dont think art is about beauty. I think its about evoking an aesthetic experience in a particular context; one shaped by culture, intention, and the viewers own perspective. Beauty might be part of it, but its not the point.
I agree. That is why I wrote on page 6
In what sense is conceptual art intended to be aesthetic?
Quoting I like sushi
Quoting I like sushi
If a work is not emotionally moving it is absolutely not art. There is no exception.
I like sushi
There has to be a line drawn somewhere,
I like sushi
?
I hope it's clear why the 1st two statements seem to contradict the next two.
I see no contradiction. Simply stating that Art is X does not mean it cannot be viewed in a variety of ways within X.
The artistic eye is not Art. The audience is disconnected and connected to the piece of art. The source of the emotion is nowhere other than in the people involved. The piece of art engages this emotional response.
This is one item of what makes an artwork an artwork. Obviously a leaf on a tree can give a sublime emotion of beauty, but it is not an artwork simply because it is beautiful. Many (or rather any) items can initiate such emotional responses, but it is the intensity of them that makes something more or less one thing than another.
A rabbit is not a car. A house it not a fruit. A concept is not art. Art can express concepts though, but that is not a defining principle of an artwork. There is no contradiction I have just let a lot unsaid because there is a helluva lot to say about this subject.
I do not need intent to produce an artwork. I do express myself emotionally when I do. It is an exploration of places and times between and around. The same goes for the audience. The artwork itself is merely a vehicle that appears concrete in and of itself. The solidity of it -- in whatever medium -- is enhanced by its beauty (or juxtapostion to beauty).
A urinal can be an object of art. It was designed and made in that particular form, by someone, and most probably expressed something beyond mere functionality to some degree. There is unwrit appeal imprinted upon every human production. We can look upon every object engaged with as Art in this respect, but then if every thing we touch is Art why use the term Art when Handmade or Machinemade serfves that purpose.
I feel like we might be going off track. I am willing to keep this going elsewhere if need be?
Actually, I'm trying to get an OP together that might be a better place. Let's hold off till then -- thanks!
Quoting Moliere
Not dour, just proper English. It doesn't seem to make sense that something can both meet needs and be useless.
You seem to use "use" in a way that excludes aesthetic use. This seems unhelpful to me, neither humans nor any other animal behave in ways that are useless, that don't meet needs or serve any purpose. If from the start you presume the behavior is useless it will be impossible to understand. How can you understand a useless, meaningless behavior?
Quoting Moliere
If we are clear that the use of art includes , for instance, making us feel certain ways, then the use and attraction of art are inseparable. That we are so strongly attracted to art is powerful evidence that art is useful, that it meets needs and serves a purpose.
Quoting hypericin
Not a useless, meaningless behavior -- but a useless meaningful behavior, or whatever else might substitute for "behavior"
Quoting hypericin
Heh, I'm afraid I sit on the other side here. That people find uses for art is not what makes art, art. Even if art serves some purpose, and there's some evolutionary/sociological purpose that explains this -- that's not what I'm talking about. That'd be the space of causes, rather than reasons for attraction.
The use of art includes making us feel certain ways -- but that's also the use of propaganda, for instance, which we'd not call art.
Vietnamese propaganda posters are considered Art by some -- including myself. I think propaganda often makes use of art to portray a message. This point may make it easier to see where I am coming from in terms of conceptual art not being art. It is not that ALL propaganda and ALL conceptual art is not art, it is about the intensity of the Art elements -- one key aspect I refer to as 'moving' the subject.
Anyone dedicated knows that there are techiniques they use, intentionally or not, that play on human perception. There is always an element of 'deceit' (maybe too strong a word) in this. An instance of this woudl be how horror movies use low frequency sounds that cause all humans to feel like they are being watched. This is obviously useful if you are trying to induce a certain emotional response to the film they are viewing. An artwork has to draw the eye or ear and -- primarily -- the feelings of those exposed to it. If there is an area of sensory experience I am unsure of when it comes to Art it would be cookery. This I find hard to place within the realm of Art in the sense of Artwork. I think it is in areas like this that we have one term 'art' and another 'Art,' where the former is more in lien with the ancient Greek 'arete' rather than referring to something liek a painting. Of course, the problem is we can talk about the arete of the Art, or art of the Art. This is where I think the mongrel language of English causes confusion.
To get back to the whole issue of Drawing and Painting (got rather sidetracked there!) I do think the element of space comes into play quite substantially. A drawing is often much smaller due to the size of the tools and the application of material onto the paper. A painting has a much larger reaching scope.
An artist out to produce a work -- in any medium -- will often begin with pencil and paper; be this to write dialogue, capture a poetic moment or literally make a rough sketch. The daily use of a tool is not something we find readily in a paintbrush compared to a pen or pencil.
I think the main difference is likely in these elements. The size and scope, as well as the daily familiarity with both tools and materials used in the process. Paint can be made from many things, so there is more of a variety in terms of texture that does not readily lend itself to paintings. There is the fluidity of painting to and layering, that can be something form of ink drawing can produce but is not exactly prone to function in that way.
I do think with more impressionistic and abstracted styles there could be an argument that painters have adopted drawing techniques such as making use of hatching techniques in their own way. Saying that, more ancient forms of Art used such abstraction early on, so realism is likely the 'unusual' case historically for a number of reasons.
You've contrasted pragmatic function with usefulness. But when Oscar Wilde said that "all art is quite useless"and I believe @Moliere is expressing basically the same thoughtit is precisely art's lack of pragmatic function that is meant. The idea is that art's value is not contingent upon a measurable, definite, or clearly apparent outcome. So the concept of usefulness here is instrumental utilitybasically another way of saying "pragmatic function". I think Oscar Wilde's use of useless might be better than yours, which seems too expansive to be ... useful.
That said, the statement that art is useless is intentionally provocative, since in modernity we are so used to justifying our practices according to their pragmatic utility; I believe people instinctively want to push back against it because they think it's a devaluation. What I like about Wilde's aphorism is that it challenges this instinctive (I would say ideological) association of value with utility, reversing it to imply that the higher the value, the less intrumentally functional something becomes. (It's no coincidence that the aphorism seems very Adornian)
...art is useless -at least when compared, say, to the work of a plumber, or a doctor, or a railroad engineer. But is uselessness a bad thing? Does a lack of practical purpose mean that books and paintings and string quartets are simply a waste of our time? Many people think so. But I would argue that it is the very uselessness of art that gives it its value -and that the making of art is what distinguishes us from all other creatures who inhabit this planet, that it is, essentially, what defines us as human beings. To do something for the pure pleasure and beauty of doing it. Think of the effort involved, the long hours of practice and discipline required to become an accomplished pianist or dancer. All the suffering and hard work, all the sacrifices in order to achieve something that is utterly and magnificently... useless.
Paul Auster
Which seems to say that art is an end in itself rather than a means to an end:
Quoting Leontiskos
But the nub is that things which are sought as ends in themselves are still valued. So moving on to the key and somewhat ambiguous claim of your post...
Quoting Jamal
I would say that the value of a means lies in moving one towards an end, whereas the value of an end is self-apparent, i.e. the intrinsic value of enjoyment or rest in the end itself.
So if we break down your claim, we could say, "Art's value is not contingent upon [... an] outcome." That's actually sufficient, given that nothing, insofar as it is sought as an end in itself, is valued as contingent upon an outcome. With that sufficient condition aside, we could look at the other three:
1. Art's value is not contingent upon anything measurable.
2. Art's value is not contingent upon anything definite.
3. Art's value is not contingent upon anything which is clearly apparent.
(1) follows from the means-end analysis, given that measurement is never an end in itself. (2) and (3) are not obviously true. Of course, I am potentially obscuring your meaning by separating out the "contingent upon an outcome" aspect, but I want to say that all of these debates boil down to the means-end concept. Note too that the means-end analysis is always intention-relative, for example in the way that aesthetic appreciation is always susceptible to the degradation which subtly transforms one's intentional participation from that of end to that of means.
(This is very similar to moral debates in modernity, for in both cases there is the assumption that if there is no instrumental rationale then there is no rationale, and on that assumption any end in itself must be nonsensical. Moral obligation and aesthetic appreciation are two kinds of ends in themselves.)
I think "useless" is too vague a word for this debate, even though on linguistic grounds I think it is wrong to say that art is meant to be used. What is used is always leveraged to gain something else. What is used is a means to an end. Art is not meant to be used (although it can be used, and this is part of the confusion, namely that it is incorrect to attempt to prescind from intention when we speak about art). Similarly, it seems strange to claim that aesthetic appreciation fulfills a "need." I would say it fulfills a desire but not a need, or that at the very least one is stretching the notion of need/necessity.
Art is something which is meant to stand alone, as an end in itself. It is not meant to be instrumental to some further purpose, except in perhaps a rather mystical sense. But this does not mean that it has no value, or no rationale, or no desirability (i.e. goodness).
So, to put it in a phrase -- that which is art is that which moves the subject.
You understand me aright. I generally see the fetish of "use" as a sort of philosophical shrug -- oh, it's useful, so that'll do as far as reason is concerned.
When I think art, in particular, invents new values for itself -- in order for something to be useful it has to have some end, as @Leontiskos points out, and it has no end. Art is an end unto itself to the point that it judges itself bad or good on criteria it invents itself.
I'm good with saying it's an "end unto itself", i.e. that art has intrinsic value. To define intrinsic value I'd compare it to extrinsic value through the question: would you do it if money were no thing? [s]If money is (EDIT: not) a part of the reason you care about something that's an intrinsic value.[/s] Blah, still confusing. I want to say "If money is the only reason you do something that's extrinsic value, and if you'd do something even if you're not paid money that's intrinsic value"
That's not to say that doing something for money annuls its intrinsic value -- the question is about what motivates the action, predominantly. If money were not an issue would you still do it anyways? If not, then that's an explicitly extrinsic value -- i.e. work. It's done for something else rather than the thing itself.
But I think "end unto itself" is about as vague as "family resemblance" -- so in either analysis, be it ends-means or family resemblance, there's still the question of "What makes a painting a work of art, in this analysis?"
Quoting Jamal
Better? It's tricky. I think the quote works because it is clear while deviating from normal usage. In most contexts "useless" connotes no utility at all, not just no instrumental utility.
What if it were not Oscar Wilde, but a 19th century schoolmarm, or a Trump appointee, saying "art is useless". Or, a friend says "that movie was useless". The meaning would be pretty clear: art, the movie, has no value. Plenty of things are 'useless' in this sense, it is not so broad a meaning as to be useless.
But I think no one here believes that, that is not why I am objecting. Instead I'm arguing against the idea that art somehow stands on its own, intrinsically meritorious, disconnected from human need and purpose. The very fact that so many are driven to devote their whole lives to art's creation, and the fact that we are seemingly driven to saturate our environment with art, speaks instead to its deep connection to human purpose, instead of an inexplicable obsession with useless things. Even if we are not always explicitly conscious of what that purpose is. It is our job as philosophers to make the implicit explicit, only then can we actually understand what we are investigating.
That's the very thing that I'm speaking against in saying art is useless at its best -- it has value, though the schoolmarm or friend doesn't understand it.
I rather think they don't understand it because "use" is so often appealed to that they can't understand why something might be valuable aside from its "use".
I'd only note that "making the implicit explicit" doesn't need "use" to describe a value. It's not for-this or for-that, but rather for-itself.
Similarly, we have sex because it feels good. We can find a purpose, like reproduction, but that's not why we do it. We do it because it attracts us, it feels good, and we want it. We have sex because we want to rather than for some purpose.
I'd rather say that the very fact that so many people decide to devote their whole lives to art's creation means that it's a human activity devoid of purpose outside of itself -- we do it because we like to.
This does not even begin to address or even acknowledge my points.
Quoting hypericin
But some of us think you're thinking about it wrong.
:up:
:up:
"We have sex because it feels good. We do art because we like it." In what sense is this supposed to be philosophy?
We have sex for all sorts of reasons beyond "feeling good", such as, to strengthen bonding with a partner, to affirm a claim upon a partner, for social status, to explore sexual identity, because it is socially normative to do so. But most crucially, you speak of the drive to reproduce as if it somehow stood outside of the way sex feels good, and the way we feel impelled to have sex? When in truth, these are two facets of the exact same phenomenon? How can you understand our feelings without the reproductive drive, and how can you understand how the reproductive drive is effectuated without our feelings?
That is "useless sex", sex divorced from all meaning, purpose, context, and understanding, so that it "just feels good".
They may be two facets of the exact same phenomenon -- granting that what I want to focus upon is the non-purposive, the "useless", the "reason why something is attractive" beyond merely "feeling good" or "it serves reproductive functioning"
Mostly because I think those aren't the only reasons why art is attractive, or why we can see a painting as a painting: it's not just that the painting feels good, it's good for this or that reason.
EDIT: Or even bad for this or that reason, but still a painting for all that.
It may be worth pointing out that recognizing that art is an end in itself does answer this current question of "use", but it does not provide the essence of art. After all, plenty of other things are ends in themselves, such as for example pleasure and friendship. By learning that aesthetic appreciation is not a means to an end, we have a better understanding of the phenomenon, but we have nevertheless not honed in on it in a truly singular way.
The other relevant question seems to be this:
Quoting Leontiskos
We can talk about an object apart from human intentions, and we can also talk about an object in a way that includes human intentions. In this thread there has been a great deal of equivocation between these two different ways of talking about an object. For example:
Quoting hypericin
If we talk about sex apart from intention then one can have sex for the sake of pleasure, or for the sake of procreation, or for the sake of bonding, or for some other reason, or for all of the above. And so sex can be used instrumentally, or it can be enjoyed as an end in itself, or it can even be both at the same time.
Art is similar, except that it is inherently ordered towards being enjoyed or appreciated as an end in itself. Thus when one instrumentalizes art they are no longer approaching it in the manner that it is meant to be approached. For example, in the film and book The Goldfinch, a rare painting is saved from a museum fire only to be used in various ways but never looked at or appreciated/enjoyed. A painting can be used as collateral in drug deals, but that is not the telos of art. It is not fundamentally what art is for. An artist does not sit down and say, "I am going to make something that will be ideal for collateral in a drug deal."
Now when we say the word "art" we are usually including the notion that it is to be approached aesthetically and as an end in itself. But a kind of reification can also occur where the word refers to the material object apart any such way of approaching it. So someone can say, "I am going to sell this piece of art and get rich," and thus use 'art' as an instrumental means to wealth. When someone uses art they are always doing something that falls away from the fundamental telos of art. This doesn't mean that it is necessarily bad or wrong - only that it is beside the real purpose of art, namely aesthetic appreciation. If we wanted to be very precise we would clearly distinguish art qua art from art qua use.
(And if @hypericin wonders what verb is properly applied to art rather than 'use', then I would recommend 'appreciate' or 'enjoy'. In the case of a painting we might say 'gaze' or 'contemplate'. It would be strange to walk up to someone viewing a painting at a museum and ask if they are done using the piece.)
We can look at a work of propaganda as possessing artistic qualities, be this through use of artistic composition or otherwise appealing to some indivdual beyond mere intellect. Just because the primary purpose of a work may be intellectual (in this case political) it can still be considered by some to possess enough 'movement' to influence the audience beyond the mere means of political/intellectual persuasion. In fact, many arguments are often dressed up in a pleasing aesthetic purposeless (or unconsciously chosen) so as to make the point hit home more cleanly. Metaphor and analogy can be put to good use in political discourse.
I see the use of art in propaganda as playing with artistic discourse/images so as to draw more appeal to an intellectual point. Of course, plenty of artwork does this too -- Banksy being an obvious case -- yet just because an artwork has a political message it does not necessarily detract from it being an artwork.
I think more confusion comes into play when art is performed rather than itemised. Going back to what I was referring to regarding the differences between static forms and temporal forms. Temporal forms of art (music, novels, plays, etc.,.) are more easily able carry political content without loses artistic significance, as they can play between 'scenes' and create interwoven narratives more than a painting or sculpture can. When Banksy shredded his work at the auction the Artwork became a symbol of a performance -- it gained a certain historical weight --- and if we refer the Act alone (the shredding) as Art we are effectively in the realm of what I would call a conceptual work NOT conceptual art.
I am curious what you think about my thoughts in the OP regarding the difference between painting and drawing? Where do you agree and disagree? Do you see much of a difference?
Cool, sorry I didnt see this earlier. I rate conceptual art as aesthetic, like any other art, because it engages our senses, and invites emotional and/or intellectual responses.
I'm not sure I would subscribe to the above definition of postmodern art - seems too proscriptive and limiting. Postmodern art is diverse and self-aware, tends to use irony and blurring of categories to challenge traditional ideas of originality, meaning, and distinctions between high and low culture. It often appeals to people who like puzzles, gimmicks, statements and ambiguities.
Are you proposing this as context-free? Or does the object need to be presented in some way as to invite such a response? If so, what might be the context?
(I think this question applies to conceptual art as well -- not sure what you're including with "post-modern")
Some of the uses of art I have in mind: mental stimulation. modulating mood. Experiencing intense emotions safely. Education. Passing the time. Having novel experiences.
Which of these is in accord with "the fundamental telos of art", and which is not?
When craftsmen create art for money, when painting was funded by patronage, when novelists and musicians aim to earn a living and even get rich, when entire industries are oriented around the production of art.. telos, or not the telos?
What are the stakes of abiding the telos, or of violating it? Where is the telos, who has defined it? Could it be... you?
You talk about intention as if there were only one of them, and we all agree on it. Art has one intention, to be appreciated for itself. Sex has one intention, pleasure. Why imagine this? It bears no resemblance to reality I can see.
Quoting Leontiskos
Kind of like how food is useful for sustaining life, but we don't use it, we eat it?
If art is meant for aesthetic experience or aesthetic encounter, then the modulation of one's mood is beside the telos of art. So if someone says, "I need to modulate my mood. I'm fresh out of benzos so I'll try looking at a painting instead," they are not interacting with art in the way that is primarily intended by the artist.
Quoting hypericin
You seem to want black and white categories, but I'm afraid its more complicated than that. The act of selling art is not art. An "artist" who just wants to get rich and is only attempting to gratify the desires of the largest demographic is not much of an artist. An artist who wants to create something which has legitimate artistic value and expects remuneration for such a creation is doing art while expecting to be supported financially. But all artists are well aware of the temptation to "sell out," subordinating their art to the bottom line.
Aristotle would point out that the true artist wishes to create something that will be appreciated by the best artists, and they will not be preoccupied with the opinion of those who do not have an eye for artistic excellence. For example, a jazz musician will highly value the opinion of other jazz musicians who they deem to be highly talented, and insofar as their work is meant to be artistic it will be meant to resonate with that caliber of excellence. The excellence of art has to do with that form of appreciation, and money may or may not track that form of excellence. Still, the artist who is primarily striving after excellence is more of an artist than the artist who is primarily striving after money. This is why some of the greatest artists died poor and were never appreciated in their own lifetime.
Quoting hypericin
I think you're just being stubborn. Do you have an alternative understanding of art to offer? Or are you just going to criticize my understanding without offering anything of your own? You somehow think that if we admit that 'art' means anything at all then we must be snobs, because if it means something then it doesn't mean other things. If art has to do with aesthetic excellence, then it doesn't have to do with large scale money-making, and this flies in the face of your dogma which holds that art is whatever we want it to be (and that art effectively means nothing at all). Being so averse to elitism that one runs to the opposite extreme does no good. It's not snobbery to hold that art means something. It is unanimously held among artists that art and money-making are not the same thing.
Quoting hypericin
"Use" generally implies perdurance, and therefore we do not generally speak about using food because food is consumed and does not perdure afterwards. Thus we will talk about using something like salt, where the stock perdures for a long time.
If you don't believe me then go to a museum and use the verb "use" to describe interaction with art. You will receive a lot of odd looks. Or find a gathering of artists and make the claim that someone who produces art only for the sake of money is no less of an artist than someone who is not primarily concerned with money. You won't be taken seriously. Art is something which is higher than use; higher than need/necessity. It is gratuitous in a way that overlooks those notions. We use a hamburger to satisfy our hunger. Someone who uses art when they are out of benzos doesn't understand what art is. It is not primarily a means of acquisition (or of anything else - to subordinate it as a means is already to have lost it).
The egalitarian dogma says that all art is equal, no one can be excluded from the circle of artists, and that art can mean anything at all, even "money-making." Reality says otherwise.
Egalitarian-relativism is actually somewhat common on TPF. @J often promotes it in the field of epistemology, and recently gave an unanswered argument against it [hide="*"](note too that anticipated this discussion with his remarkable claim that no music is better or worse than any other music)[/hide].
So let's revamp @Count Timothy von Icarus' first premise for our new context:
1. Either some human act/creation is more artistic than some other human act/creation, or else no human act/creation is more artistic than any other human act/creation.
This is the same as saying:
So what do you think? Do you prefer P or ~P?
Another way to put it, closer to Count's initial phrasing:
1a. Either some thing is more artistic than some other thing, or else no thing is more artistic than any other thing.
This is the same as saying:
A similar question: Do you prefer Q or ~Q?
If we accept P and Q does that make us elitist? Note that ~P equates to the idea that every human act/creation is equally artistic, and ~Q equates to the idea that every thing is equally artistic, hence the egalitarian-relativism. I suspect that like @J and @Banno you will object every time someone offers an example of P/Q and yet at the same time you will avoid any explicit embrace of ~P/~Q.*
* In that other thread the pejorative which was applied to anyone who offered an example of P/Q was "authoritarian" rather than "elitist," but the parallel is clear.
As it is said "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder".
An aesthetic may be defined as there being a unity in variety, a pattern in chaos.
Such an aesthetic might be discovered by a human observer in any observed object, whether architecture, dance, science, theatre, philosophy, literature, politics, art and nature.
As a first approximation, the Modernist artist deliberately creates an object in which an aesthetic may be discovered by a human observer. The Postmodernist artist, as a reaction against Modernism, deliberately creates an object minimising any aesthetic.
However, alongside a Postmodern artwork there may be accompanying descriptive text, either by the artist or commentator. As such accompanying textual description is not attached to the artwork, it cannot be considered to be part of the artwork.
As an aesthetic is deliberately minimised in Postmodern artworks, the observer might not discover any aesthetic within them, although they may discover an aesthetic in any accompanying descriptive text.
In summary, an aesthetic is not part of a Postmodern artwork, athough may be discovered in an accompanying descriptive text.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't disagree with your description of Postmodernism, but none of the terms used requires an aesthetic. For example, something may be diverse without being aesthetic.
As regards language, it is nature of language that there is a spread of meaning in a term, and it may well be the case that the meaning of two different terms may overlap.
The context of the object is relevant. A pebble on a beach never seen or imagined by anyone cannot be a Postmodern artwork. For someone to take that pebble off the beach, display it in the Whitechapel Gallery, and accompany it with the statement that the pebble represents the anguish of the individual within a capitalist society, then it has become a Postmodern artwork.
In fact, the pebble does not even need to be taken off the beach. A photograph or video of the pebble may be displayed in the Whitechapel Gallery. Or even there may be a video of someone in the Whitechapel Gallery saying that they have seen a pebble on a beach.
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Quoting J
I include Conceptual Art within Postmodernism.
From the Tate:
All postmodern art has some kind of aesthetic. It doesnt have to be about beauty; rather, like any work, its an invitation to experience something aesthetically.
To experience something aesthetically means to engage with it through your senses and perception, paying attention to its qualities: form, texture, colour, tone, or atmosphere. And the work's conceptual and cultural context. Its about how the artwork affects you emotionally, intellectually, or even physically, whether through pleasure, discomfort, curiosity, or reflection.
Quoting RussellA
Minimizing? Is that because it cant be eliminated? Or is it more accurate to say that all art is aesthetic, regardless of the school or style? The difference lies in how much a viewer cares for or engages with it.
Sounds like you have a hierarchy of what counts as art, or maybe just what counts as good art? Thoughts?
I agree that aesthetics is more than beauty, and can includes the beauty of a Monet "water lilies" and the ugliness of a Picasso "Guernica".
I agree that an observer engages with a Postmodern artwork through their senses and perception, but this does require the artwork to be aesthetic.
An observer of a Postmodern artwork may pay attention to its qualities: form, texture, colour, tone, or atmosphere, but again this does not require the artwork to be aesthetic.
An observer of a Postmodern artwork may pay attention to its conceptual and cultural context, but this does not require the object to be aesthetic.
An observer of a Postmodern artwork may be affected emotionally by looking at it, but in what way is anger aesthetic?
An observer of a Postmodern artwork may be affected intellectually by looking at it, but in what way is knowing that grass is green aesthetic?
In what way is the pleasure of drinking a cup of coffee aesthetic?
In what way is the discomfort of sitting on a hard chair aesthetic?
In what way is being curious about where foxes have their den aesthetic?
In what way is reflecting on what happened yesterday aesthetic?
Of course, you may be defining every object that causes an emotional feeling or intellectual thought as having an aesthetic. But if that were the case, every possible object in the Universe would have an aesthetic. But I don't think that is how the word is used.
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Quoting Tom Storm
I find it impossible to believe that most people don't accept that there is a hierarchy in art. Is there anyone who would try to argue that the quality of a Bob Ross painting is equal to the quality of a Leonardo da Vinci painting?
Good, so we need to consider context. But is your example literally possible? I noted this earlier in the thread, but it's worth repeating: If "someone" does -- or tries to do -- what you're suggesting with the pebble, they would a) probably not get past the security guards, and b) if they succeeded, they would be judged a vandal rather than an artist.
In short, it takes more than "someone" to successfully place a pebble as art in the Whitechapel Gallery. Who else is needed, and what is that context? This is where so-called institutional theories of art start to gain traction, I think.
Yes, that person has to be a member of the pre-existing Artworld, a loose collection of art institutions, artists, critics, curators, art teachers, auction houses and wealthy collectors.
https://fromlight2art.com/institutional-art-theory-explained/
Postmodernism is an example whereby the word "art" has been given a new meaning by this Artworld. As you say, the Institutional Theory.
For someone to place a pebble as art in the Whitechapel Gallery, they would have to "play the game". This may take a few years, but is possible. For example, they could become an art teacher at St Martins School Of Art, submit articles to Art Quarterly, hire a gallery in Shoreditch to exhibit their own conceptual works, volunteer for DACS in order to get to know Gilane Tawadros and perhaps submit to the Venice Biennale.
A fair amount of work, but not everyone gets to see their very own pebble in one of London's most prestigious Postmodern Art Galleries.
Quoting RussellA
:grin:
We've already covered this. An object curated and put on display by an artist is an invitation to view it aesthetically. Whether you or I appreciate or enjoy this or not is a separate matter.
Quoting RussellA
Not sure why these questions have been inserted here, and we were doing so well. Jeff Koons is a postmodern artist. How is his work not an invitation to have an aesthetic experience? I dislike his work, by the way
But since you raised it - an experience is aesthetic when we pay attention to how it feels, looks, or affects us, not just what it does. Drinking coffee becomes aesthetic when we enjoy its taste, smell, and warmth. Sitting on a hard chair can be aesthetic if we notice how it feels and how it makes us sit. Its about noticing and appreciating the experience, not just using it for a purpose.
Quoting RussellA
There is definitely a hierarchy of taste and academic opinion. Art criticism and art history is part of an intersubjective community. It's pretty easy to say that a cel from a Bugs Bunny cartoon is less 'important' as art than a Rembrandt. (Although Bugs may well have provided more pleasure.) But what about Rembrandt versus Van Gogh? Or da Vinci versus Michelangelo? Is a play by John Osborne better or worse than a play by Arthur Miller? For the most part, I think attempts to impose hierarchies and criteria of value on art are largely moot, though it does keep academics, critics, and the art market in business. Humans love to rate things.
You seem to have ascribed a fair amount of doctrine to me that I have not explicitly set forth.
I prefer P, Q.
Quoting Leontiskos
I do, and I've already offered it to you directly. Here is my current formulation:
Art is a human creation (in the loosest, most permissive sense) whose experience is designed to modify the mental state of the experiencer.
You will no doubt feel that mine is vastly too permissive, just as yours is vastly too restrictive to me. Yet we both believe P, Q.
The problem with yours is that you, like so many, conflate the question of "what is good art" with "what is art". Much of what you wrote just reads as a list of your opinions on good art. But that may well be what @Moliere is actually asking, and so I might be the one who is ot.
Okay, well it is promising that we both at least hold to P and Q. :up:
Quoting hypericin
I worry that this isn't a real attempt at a definition, on account of the possibility that "art" is being presupposed rather than described.
For example, if we offered a description, "A human creation (in the loosest, most permissive sense) the experience of which is designed to modify the mental state of the experiencer," would we arrive at the definiendum "art"?
The first difficulty is semantic. The clause, "whose experience is designed," or, "the experience of which is designed," are both semantically problematic, because both presuppose that experience is itself somehow designed. Probably what you mean is that art is a human creation designed to modify the mental state of the person who experiences it, and that's clear enough.
First I will say that your idea does capture something that I find in many artists I know, so that's promising. But if this is the definition of art then anything designed to modify the mental state of the experiencer is art. Keeping with my example, this would mean that benzodiazepines are art. And if hunger is a mental state then every prepared food is art. This seems unlikely. Do you hold that benzodiazepines are art?
It may be helpful to introduce R beside P and Q, which includes a more specific genus:
Would you prefer R or ~R? And is this where my understanding becomes "too restrictive"? Because I definitely think that some art is better than other art, at least on any reasonable definition of 'art'.
No. By "experience" I mean, experience by the five senses. The effect of a benzo is not in the taste, but requires absorption into the blood stream. Drugs are human creations designed to alter physical state (and this alteration in turn, may or may not alter mental state). I exclude this, the alteration must arise from the experience of the purported art, in the above sense of "experience".
Similar for food. Food allays hunger by altering physical state. But, most food is also designed to alter mental state by the experience of it's taste, appearance, and smell, and so most (prepared) food is also art.
Quoting Leontiskos
Why is this helpful to the question of "what is art"? To be sure, I think a frowny face scrawled on printer paper with feces is worse than a Rembrandt, by any reasonable definition of "worse" here, so I also believe R.
Okay, that's a reasonable answer.
Quoting hypericin
Would it then follow that if we have a prepared food that is not art, and then someone adds salt to make it taste better, it has become art? I am not convinced that such a thing is correctly identified as art.
Quoting hypericin
Okay, fair. But how is one to judge better or worse according to your definition? The only characteristic on your definition is, "designed to modify the mental state of the experiencer." If that is the only characteristic in your definition of art, then it seems like better/worse could only be derived from the degree of modification intended or else achieved.
More concretely, is the frowny face drawing worse than a Rembrandt because it does not modify the mental state of the experiencer as effectively? Given that you used feces, isn't it possible that the frowny face would modify mental state more? On the view that I set out quality can be identified by looking at .
I think it would be art. The addition of salt, and the quantity added, is an aesthetic choice designed to modify mental state, in this case taste perception. Our "artist" may have chosen pepper instead, or, to really go all out, both.
But note, I agree with P and Q, and so I acknowledge that some art is more artistic than others. This meal would be a minimal example of art, barely belonging to the category at all, probably not enough to identify as art in an everyday context. Compare with a 5 star Michelin meal, much more artistic (but not better) , and which most everyone would call art.
Quoting Leontiskos
No, and here you are again conflating identification vs evaluation of art. My definition is only for identification, evaluation is an orthogonal problem.
Consider again the Michelin meal. There are many basic meals (meals only marginally artistic) I would much rather eat than many Michelin meals. Many basic meals are just better, to me. Yet, I easily acknowledge that all the Michelin meals are more artistic than all the basic meals.
There are no doubt many gourmands who would always prefer the Michelin meals. Me and the gourmands are at an impasse, we have no independent way of deciding which is better, and nor should we expect one. Yet, we can both happily accept that the Michelin meals are more artistic.
Hmm, okay.
Quoting hypericin
But isn't it curious that in R I said "better (or more artistic)," and in your own posts you recognize that some art is more artistic? Usually if something is more artistic then we would say that it is better qualified to be art, so I don't see how you can so neatly separate identification vs. evaluation. Usually the definition of art is going to determine what is more or less artistic. What else could do the job? Or do we disagree on this?
Quoting hypericin
To be clear, I think you are saying that the Michelin meal is not necessarily preferable to a basic meal, but it is more artistic.
I have the same question: Why? Why is the Michelin meal more artistic than the basic meal? Why is the Rembrandt better than the frowny face?
(A notable point of agreement here may be this: That which barely qualifies as art at all is much more likely to be mistaken for non-art than something which readily qualifies as art, and the person who makes a mistake with regard to the former is much less mistaken than the person who makes a mistake with regard to the latter.)
You are saying that we have an aesthetic experience when we are aware of having a feeling. This feeling may be pleasant, such as drinking coffee, or unpleasant, such as sitting in a hard chair.
For example, you say that if we have feelings towards a Jeff Koons artwork, then we are having an aesthetic experience.
You seem to be saying that all our feelings are aesthetic experiences.
However, this is not how the word is generally used. I am sure I am correct in saying that as the word is generally used, some feelings may be aesthetic experiences and some feelings may not be aesthetic experiences.
If that is the case, Jeff Koons, as a Postmodern artist, may be inviting the observer to have a feeling towards his artwork, but it does not follow that this feeling must be aesthetic.
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Quoting Tom Storm
We agree that there is a general hierarchy in art from the more important to the less important. For example, a Bugs Bunny cartoon is less important as art than a Rembrandt. Though of course the particulars may be argued over. For example, is a John Osborne play more or less important as art than a Arthur Miller play?
By saying "better (or more artistic)" you are conflating evaluation and identification. We identify art by whether it is artistic or not. If A is more qualified as art than B, A is more artistic than B. But this does NOT mean A is better than B. This is demonstrated by the meal example. Every 5 star Michelin meal is more artistic than salted oatmeal. But there are many 5 star Michelin meals I would rather eat oatmeal than them.
Quoting Leontiskos
Much more effort, intention, time, resources, and training was devoted to the Michelin meal, all to create an object very carefully honed to modify the mental state of the consumer of the meal in a very specific way
Quoting Leontiskos
I do not have a grip on the better question, and doubt there can be an account independent of preference. To be sure, the Rembrandt is also vastly more artistic than A Foul Frown, which seriously confuses the question here. .
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, we agree here.
You are conflating better simpliciter with better qua art. Someone who desires art will hold that what is more artistic is better than what is less artistic. You yourself claimed that, "a frowny face scrawled on printer paper with feces is worse than a Rembrandt." Obviously when I talk about some art being better than some other art I am talking about the idea of better art. I am not talking about, for example, the idea of better caloric content.
Quoting hypericin
So you would say that something is more artistic depending on the, "effort, intention, time, resources, and training," that go into it? It would follow that if two people spend the same amount of effort/intention/time/resources/training on two pieces of art, then the two pieces of art must be equally artistic. Do you think that's right? You seem to be reducing the quality or artistic depth of art to the effort put forth by the artist, such that artistic quality is only a measure of the artist's effort.
Quoting hypericin
But does it really confuse the question to claim that there is a relation between the quality of art and its status as art? If there is no relation, then how is it possible that, "the person who makes a mistake with regard to the former is much less mistaken than the person who makes a mistake with regard to the latter"? If that which barely qualifies as art is justifiably more likely to be mistaken for non-art, then it would seem that what is less artistic is less art. It seems to me that your binary notion of art vs. non-art does not track with our experience. Note too that "preference" will become less central when we are talking about Rembrandt. Rembrandt will be recognized as art regardless of preference. The frowny face will not.
Depending on the individual and the context, an object barely recognizable as art may evoke a profound aesthetic experience, while a Rembrandt masterpiece might, for some reason, be dismissed outright. The experience is what has value and counts as art.
Im saying that when an artist presents something as art, its an invitation to explore it aesthetically.
But yes, more broadly, our experience of the world may also be largely aesthetic. The aesthetic goes beyond art: our sensory and perceptual engagement with the world is aesthetic in nature.
Quoting RussellA
It does not follow that the feeling cant be aesthetic, thats what youve been saying about postmodern art. Bear in mind that whether you enjoy or appreciate something is a separate question.
I'm not even sure that non-aesthetic art is possible. Even if an artist adopts an anti-aesthetic position, the work may end up with a contrived negative aesthetic, a deliberate choice that still shapes how we perceive and respond to it, and that perception is itself aesthetic.
What power do you think lies behind an aesthetic experience? Why do you withhold it from certain categories? How do you define an aesthetic experience?
Totally agree.
As you say "It's pretty easy to say that a cel from a Bugs Bunny cartoon is less 'important' as art than a Rembrandt". There is a hierarchy in the importance as art of an object.
Similarly, it seems clear that there is also a hierarchy in the aesthetic of an object. For example, I am sure that most would agree that the aesthetics in the object that is Leonardo's painting "The Last Supper" are higher than the aesthetics in the object that is a straight line.
In other words, it is not the case that an object is either art or not art, or an object is either aesthetic or not aesthetic
Every object can be thought of as art and having an aesthetic, though some objects are more artistic or more aesthetic than other objects.
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Quoting Tom Storm
In words, I would agree with Francis Hutcheson's approach:
The ability to discover patterns in chaos (ie, an aesthetic) is an important part of human cognition.
However, as with other aspects of human cognition, there are limits to any explanation.
For example, when you look at grass, why do you perceive the colour green rather than the colour blue. Any deep explanation is beyond current scientific or philosophical understanding.
Similarly, when one looks at "The Last Supper" and a straight line and have a greater artistic and aesthetic experience with "The Last Supper" than the straight line, any deep explanation is beyond current scientific or philosophical understanding.
I could say that "The Last Supper" is more complex than a straight line, but this raises the question, why is something more complex of necessity either more artistic or more aesthetic, to which there is no answer.
For me, an object is aesthetic if I discover within it a unity within variety, in the same way that I discover greenness in grass.
This is the kind of definitional approach that interests me. The question then becomes are there instances of some/all of these elements in items not considered 'an experience of art'. If I view a beautiful river I would not call it Art yet the experience has all the hallmarks of what you mention.
The question for me then is if someone literally created a physical representation of a river that could be easily mistaken for a natural river then has that person produced Art? I guess for you you see no disparity other than in the creation (which does not fit into your definition of Art as an object).
So, you literally call the appreciation of natural beauty that moves someone Art but the Art 'is in the eye of the beholder' rather than the beauty?
I'm reasonably comfortable with this for pragmatic purposes.
Quoting RussellA
As long as we recognise that the hierarchy is man-made, rather than discovering a hierarchy in the aesthetic, we are projecting one onto it, based on shared contingent cultural norms, language, and histories and not intrinsic qualities of the object. This may present problems for those who believe objects themselves possess aesthetic qualities. But since I'm sympathetic to postmodernism and you're not, maybe we won't get passed this.
Quoting RussellA
It's not very surprising that a painting based on a well-known story, with narrative power and complexity, would draw a stronger emotional reaction than a line with no clear meaning in itself. More or less the same thing would happen if you compared a straight line to a Pez dispenser. We dont require Da Vinci...
Additionally, what we take to be a "greater" aesthetic experience with The Last Supper over a straight line isnt about uncovering some objective depth in the work. Its the result of shared practices, education, and cultural narratives that shape how we respond. The difference isnt in the objects themselves, but in the interpretive habits we've inherited. What feels profound is what weve learned to see as profound.
Exactly my thoughts.
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Quoting Tom Storm
Though have sufficient interest to have been to the Venice Biennale.
I have a question.
Suppose the Postmodern artwork is a single pebble in the Whitechapel accompanied by a statement by the artist.
Is the "artwork" just the pebble or is the "artwork" the pebble plus the accompanying statement by the artist?
I guess that's why we have critics... But I'd imagine the statement is part of the artwork.
Copilot agrees "In Postmodernism, the boundary between the artwork and its accompanying statement is often deliberately blurred."
In that event, even though there may minimal aesthetic in the physical object, such as a pebble, there may be substantial aesthetic in the accompanying statements, whether by the artist, gallery or critic.
So overall, if a Postmodern artwork includes both the physical object and accompanying statements, there may well be substantial aesthetic in a Postmodern artwork.
That is why the physical object in a Postmodern artwork may be either minimal or imagined. In other words, conceptual. The concept in a Postmodern artwork is more important than any physical object.
The aesthetic is in the thoughts initiated by a real or imaginary object rather than the object itself.
Quoting RussellA
Quoting RussellA
But this is not only true of post-modernism. There is no such thing as an art work without an "accompanying statement." To suppose otherwise is to subscribe to the idea of an "innocent eye" which is somehow able to encounter an art work without knowing anything about it, or about art, disregarding the time and place of the encounter, and without bringing any cultural or individual experience to bear. Is there anyone on this thread who disagrees that this is a fiction?
Post-modernism perhaps is more deliberate about bringing this to our attention.
I know that these images have an aesthetic and are therefore art without knowing anything about the cultures they originated in.
The beauty of the aesthetic in art is that the observer only needs an innocent eye.
One problem with Postmodernism is that depends on its existence through the promotion of elitism within society, an incestuous Artworld that deliberately excludes the "common person" in its goal of academic exclusivity.
Sure, so do I, but "the culture they originated in" is only one element of what I'm calling the "accompanying statement." My list of what constitutes an innocent eye was partial, but taking it as a starting point, do you feel that, when you encounter one of the above artworks (which are extraordinary, by the way, thanks!) you:
- know nothing about it? Really??
- know nothing about art yourself, from your own culture?
- are able to encounter the art in a way that is separate from a time and place?
- bring no cultural or individual experience to bear?
That would be, per impossibile, a truly innocent eye. And would we even be able to recognize art, using such an eye?
Innocence is a matter of degree, of course, but I think we should really try to notice what we already know, or think we know, when we see a work of art from an unfamiliar culture.
There are two distinct, separate and independent aspects.
On the one hand, there is the object as it exists independent of what one knows about it, and on the other hand there is what one knows about the object.
There is the object, for example a Lascaux cave painting.
There is what one knows about it. Estimated at around 17,000 to 22,000 years old, painted by the Magdalenian peoples, reindeer hunters who possibly engaged in cannibalism.
That the the object was possibly painted by a reindeer hunter has no bearing on the aesthetics of the object. The object has an aesthetic value regardless of whether it was painted by a reindeer hunter or a plant gatherer.
It is true that I know something about the Lascaux cave paintings, I know something about the Fauve artists of the 20th C and I have a particular cultural and individual experience, but all these have no effect on my seeing an object that has great aesthetic value.
In discovering an aesthetic in the Lascaux cave painting, my eye is innocent of any knowledge of facts and figures.
The ultimate "innocence," which I'm arguing is an impossible limit-case, would have you looking at the Lascaux painting from a kind of "view from nowhere" -- suddenly, somehow, it appears before you, and you have no context in which to surmise it might be an art object, or for whom. Moreover, you yourself have no exposure to art up until this hypothetical moment.
I think we agree this is a fiction?
So the more practical question is, how much does each particular bit of knowledge you do bring to the painting affect your ability to have a pure or semi-innocent view? You say:
Quoting RussellA
I find this hard to understand. Are you saying that your own cultural and individual experience of art, which you bring to the Fauve painting, has no effect on your perception of "great aesthetic value"? That anyone can see it? That seems so counter-intuitive that I think we must be somewhat at cross-purposes here. Maybe you could elaborate a bit? I think you're wanting to say that the painting contains, in and of itself, aesthetic value?
We're talking about an actual, literal written statement. Most works are without such a thing.
Quoting J
This is a different matter from a physical, prescriptive note from the artist. Also, I think there are plenty of people who are unfamiliar with artworks and have no idea how to engage with them or what they even are.
And by the way, an artist's statement may not be helpful. The artist might be mistaken about their work or might be deliberately trying to disrupt an interpretive framework, perhaps even being playful. A written statement may not support the work at all, but instead function as a provocative declaration that only adds to its ambiguity.
I once saw a broken wooden kitchen chair painted silver and black and arranged on display at an exhibition. There was a note from the artist. It read: 'The song is sung, but singing doesnt help.' Such a message doesnt add much to the work; it simply invites a lot of innocent speculation. The artist was later overheard saying, "I dont know what it means. It just seemed to work." I'm not sure they were right about this.
Quoting RussellA
A common view but I think it misses the mark. Theres plenty of postmodern art created by graduate artists and unknown, underexposed, even struggling artists who see in postmodernism a vitality and opportunity for expression that you or others may not.
I know, but I was pointing out that there's much less difference than at first appears, and suggesting we think about an "accompanying statement" more broadly. Because we can pose the same question about traditional art: How much information, if any, should be included as "part of" such a piece? At what point does information become necessary in order to see a Renaissance work as art? Leonardo may not have offered us a written statement, but his tradition did, or something very like it.
And then there's the name of the painting . . . part of the work?
Quoting Tom Storm
No doubt. So, is that the sort of "innocent eye" we'd find desirable? Probably not.
I don't see a contradiction. I do a lot of painting and the activity is unquestionably aesthetic. Think of an art form like music, it can be an aesthetic experience for the performer and the audience simultaneously.
Quoting I like sushi
If art is a social construct then it's in the eye of beholder's, I suppose.
What I think is interesting is the idea that the recognition of art may trigger 'aesthetic mode' in a conditioned response/constructed emotion sort of way.
I understood that but I think this is stretching this idea too far, but we dont have to agree.
Quoting J
Only if it suits the critic's/owner's/seller's narrative...
Quoting J
How we see and rate art is contingent on culture, education and values. We dont just see a work as 'art', we have the potential to read into any work at many levels. If youre just seeing Leonardo as a decorative thing, who cares? Im personally not attracted to Leonardos work in general and I have superficial knowledge about his time or why he matters. So I haven't accessed any written information to help me form a view that he is 'special'. But I know he is rated... he's a brand, a popstar.
Quoting J
Depends on the purpose. Obviously no good for an art historian or dealer. I think the era of the dilettante expert and appreciator of culture and art may have ended. There used to be a pretence that the educated man (and later woman) would aim at a kind of Renaissance expertise and connoisseurship. I think cultural awareness of this kind used to be a form of virtue signalling, which is probably now left to pronouns and anti-colonisation lectures. :wink:
Quoting Tom Storm
Sure. It's a thought experiment, really. Nothing of great moment depends on it.
Quoting Tom Storm
What about for a philosopher? Do we want to argue that aesthetic value is neutral as regards the amount of information a viewer may have access to?
Sure - there are many others too, I just picked a couple.
Can you rephrase this? I'm assuming you're asking whether the aesthetic value of a work is independent from the information we have about it. You could easily write an essay on this. Personally, I tend to think that whatever value a work has is tied to who we are and what we know/experince. I dont believe a work holds aesthetic value in itself, its always in relation to some criterion of value, whether basic or sophisticated.
I'd better -- it was pretty ugly, sorry!
Quoting Tom Storm
That's more like it. Yes, that's what I was asking. And as a corollary: Does the aesthetic value change relative to what we know about a work? Like you, I think art is understood only in context, not in some idealized free space. Part of that understanding is aesthetic judgment.
I've written my fair share of ugly sentences. :smile:
Quoting J
From a personal perspective, I would say that the more you know about something, the deeper your understanding and concomitant appreciation might be.
And aesthetic value changes with age and time. If you saw Psycho in 1960, it would have likely been shocking work of art. Some kids I know saw it and they found it dull and comic, and not in the right places.
I used to work for an antiquities dealer, selling Greek, Roman and Egyptian pieces and venerable, overpriced furniture. If you were a connoisseur of such things you might go into paroxysms of aesthetic delight over a Roman torso, which for someone else might just be some broken rubble. We never just relate to things as things; they are also objects of projected meaning. Or something like that.
In my experience, that projection can deepen the aesthetic. Whether or not thats a vice or a virtue I tend to think aesthetic experience is beneficial in nature.
Obviously, you could argue that something created long ago may not have really been viewed/created as a piece of art (say a piece of furniture or a device for learning), but here we can appreciated the aesthetic quality of it and look upon it as a work of art (it was still made by someone).
I find nature beautiful for sure, but barring a belief in some Creator I do not view a mountain as Artwork.
I agree that postmodern art is an opportunity for expression. I think less through the physical object but more through accompanying statements.
These unknown, underexposed postmodern artists, what exactly are they struggling against?
It seems that they are struggling to break into the Artworld, which is, as I see it, an exclusive club rather than a democratic institution.
This "innocence" is common in human cognition.
For example, when I look at grass, I don't think to myself, what colour should I see this grass as, should I see it as yellow, red, green or purple. I don't approach seeing colours with any preconceptions. In seeing the colour of an object my approach is no different to that of an innocent baby. I see the colour I see.
Similarly, with seeing an aesthetic in an object.
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Quoting J
Yes.
My belief is that every society in the past 17,000 years would recognise the aesthetic value in the Lascaux cave paintings. From the Sumerians through the Minoans up to the Greeks, Romans and into the 21st C, regardless of their particular religious, political or cultural beliefs.
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Quoting J
No.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"
The object does not contain aesthetic value. The object contains a certain form in which an observer can see an aesthetic.
Do you see light blue and dark blue as shades of the same colour?
I think the average person also sees the art world as elitist and hard to traverse. I'd say hardship is the primary struggle for most artists unless they gain a following, but thats just as true for acting, music, and writing as it is for painting.
Art's definitely not democratic, however. It's more of a meritocracy. Exclusive club? It's a whole set of clubs, not just one, and some of them are not exclusive. But like any club, the level of its elitism depends upon the audience.
To succeed in art, it's not an art world you need to satisfy, it's the punters who wish to buy and hang your work. But the machinations of dealers and critics are a separate matter entirely.
I'd say this is inaccurate.
To begin with, an innocent baby doesnt know what colours are or what theyre called. They need to be socialised and taught colour, just as they are taught shapes, and patterns and even their meanings and uses (e.g., 'blue for boys, pink for girls'). In the same way, our aesthetic isnt in the object as much as it is our way of seeing, which is the product of contingent factors like our era, education, culture, perception, and senses. I'm colour-blind, so what I see is different from some others. I wouldnt think theres any such thing as an 'innocent' view.
Yes. Doesn't everyone.
The top two colours have a family resemblance, and as members of the same family are similar but not identical.
No. Russians dont.
Some pairs of hues are closer together than others, but the rest is preconceptions.
When stung by a wasp, you don't need to know the name "pain" before feeing pain. You feel pain regardless of what it is called.
Similarly with seeing colour, you don't need to know the name "cadmium blue" before seeing cadmium blue.
Similarly with having an aesthetic experience, you don't need to know the name "aesthetic experience" before having an aesthetic experience.
You need a name in order to communicate your subjective experience with other people, but you don't need a name to have that subjective experience.
But perhaps we are too far apart on this matter.
I have never been to Russia, but they seem to have the word ?????
What does ????? mean?
https://linguapedia.info/en/russian/vocabulary/colours
Perhaps we are too far apart on this matter.
Replacing "cadmium blue" by "pain"
I would have thought that our subjective feeling of pain was independent of language. In other words, does knowing the name of our pain change the subjective feeling?
You need to do more research. What is shown there is closer to ??????? than to ?????. ????? in English is dark blue or maybe deep blue.
The word blue has no equivalent in Russian; translations are approximate and misleading. If you actually take on board what I said, which is that Russians (Russian speakers) do not see light blue and dark blue as shades of the same colour, then you will understand why this is the case.
But pain is not art, nor is it an interpretation of an object's aesthetic elements. So there's a problem with that comparison. This isn't a question about simple reactions to simple stimuli, it's a much more complex question concerning the aesthetics of an artwork.
By your reckoning, all we're doing is looking at shapes and colours, without context, composition, and experience. That strikes me as a very limited conception of aesthetics. If one did this to a work by Caravaggio where would we get?
Going back to pain for a moment, in a hospital, one of the first questions asked is, "On a scale of one to ten, how much does it hurt?" This reveals that pain alone isnt self-interpreting; we need language and description to give it meaning, to locate it within a framework that allows for understanding, assessment, and response. Not to mention the subsidiary questions: is it a stabbing pain, an acute pain, a burning pain, a dull ache, and so on...
There is an exception with a group in Africa. Cannot recall their name/location, but they discern "colour difference" more between shade than tone. So it could be said that they perceive shade as we perceive colour and colour as we perceive shade (although I think this is mostly, if not entirely, between the common mismatch of blue and green).
Orange used to be just a shade of red. Language does play some role in here and some have even posited that without language there woudl be no colour experience!
So have I and they dont. But your comment is meaningless without more information. The colours denoted by ????? and blue are not the same.
Are you saying:
1) Russians don't see light blue and dark blue as shades of the colour blue. I would be surprised if Russians saw colours differently to non-Russians.
2) Russian speakers have Russian words for "light blue" and "dark blue", and these Russian words don't make any reference to being part of the same colour "blue". But this applies to English also, in that neither ultramarine nor cerulean refer to the colour blue.
Though the experience of pain and the aesthetic experience are both subjective feelings, and both exist in the mind rather than the world.
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Quoting Tom Storm
Take away all the shapes and colours from Caravaggio's "Boy Peeling Fruit" c. 1592-1593 and what would remain?
As Clive Bell said, it is the Significant Form of these shapes and colours that establishes the aesthetic.
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Quoting Tom Storm
I walk into my house holding my hand and looking for antiseptic after being stung by a wasp.
I am carried into a hospital after being run down by a car and screaming in pain.
Language is not needed to distinguish the level of pain on a scale from one to ten.
Yes, ????? and ??????? are basic colour terms and are thus seen as basic colours, not as shades of the same colour.
Quoting RussellA
The difference is that we think of ultramarine and cerulean as shades of blue, since in English that's what they are.
Read this, it's short:
https://thecolorlanguageproject.wordpress.com/2016/07/24/linguistic-facts-about-color/
A result of what I just said is that Russians can distinguish shades of blue more accurately than English speakers, showing that perception is to some degree linguistically relative. See this study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104
[quote=Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination;https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104]English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (goluboy) and darker blues (siniy). We investigated whether this linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination. We tested English and Russian speakers in a speeded color discrimination task using blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions. These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).[/quote]
I think English speakers have the same thing with pink and red. It's hard to grasp that pink is light red because we never call it that. We have potent and distinct emotional associations with each, so it's almost a little magical that adding white to red makes pink.
I think habit has a lot to do with the way we describe things. Habit actually configures highways through the nervous system, so maybe language (not just the syntax, but the whole history and emotional anchoring) influences what a person is conscious of.
Language does affect what a person is conscious of.
Count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball
Makes them realise how LITTLE they are actively conscious of more like ;) Such focus shows how limited our active visual perception is. It still blows my mind to think that the vast majority of what I think I can see is just a patchwork of previous experiences knitted together to form a coherent whole.
I have mentioned before that I believe there is cultural relevance in the distinction depending on how we use the tools in day-to-day life (the pen or the brush).
I wonder if that's the case of blue particularly or for most or all colors. I'll read more myself when I get time.
In Russian it's only blue; the other colours correspond. But of all the colours I suspect the green-blue region is particularly variable across languages.
I thought it interesting that its blue because according to the BerlinKay color term hierarchy theory blue is the latest primary color, or maybe to think of it differently, the least important primary.
According to the theory (or study?) colors were added in about the same order across languages. That order being:
Red
Green or yellow
Both green and yellow
Blue
Brown
Purple, pink, orange, gray, etc.
It may not indicate anything of course and be purely coincidental.
Very interesting. I'm in danger of going down a rabbit hole now.
Really! What on Earth do they base that on? That seems to fly in the face of evolutionary biology. We have three receptors in our eyes and one is specialised towards blue light which control our cycadian rhythm.
White rabbit, blue dress, red queen
Such different uses in language pervade other areas too. In South Korea parents prioritise prepositions over knowns when teaching their language. This results in very young children being far better at spacial logic puzzles but far worse at categorising compared to other children.
The same do doubt effects our perceptions of painting and drawings. A non-artist with little to no exposure to artworks would likely not really care about any difference. Language certainly builds hard wired cogntiive preferences -- that is obvious though right?
Simply the order that the names for colors begin appearing in written language.
If you asked someone who didnt yet have a name for blue what the color of the sky is they would likely say something like black. That doesnt mean they cant actually see blue.
Quoting RussellA
We now know that how we conceptualize the spectrum does affect how we see colours. But the underlying point has been standard in philosophy for centuries. Intuitions (as in perceptions) without concepts are blind, as Kant said. All seeing is seeing as (see Sellars and the "Myth of the Given") and all perception is targeted, selective, and organized according to the state of the perceiver and its desiresall of which for humans includes preconceptions.
The idea of a pure, preconceptual and uninterpreted perception is widely rejected in philosophy. RussellA was arguing for a primary, universal innocence in the perception and appreciation of a work of art, based on the idea that colours are perceived in a basic way universally. The example of Russian blues is just one among many that show this to be naive.
The point he's leading to is that the perception and appreciation of art are not separate, that art is meaningful all the way down. What the eye does with light of varying wavelengths and intensities is none of our businessunless we're doing physiology or optics.
Not just art.
Goats too.
It is kind of obvious that this will flow into language and concept use. I would bet that a English speaker would be better able to distinguish teal and turqouise where a Russian would struggle as the concepts are not so rigidly defined. The same was true for Orange which is a reletively new addition to the English language.
I prefer Husserl's use of 'pregnant' meaning we fill in the gaps that are not seen -- we see beyond knowing there is a surface, side, rear and volume. His use of 'parts' and 'moments' is useful, but I do think Heidegger did a better job of articulating a lot of what Husserl had to say.
Another rabbit hole: constructed emotion theory and aesthetic experience.
When would a hunter gatherer actually need to distinguish blue from other colors? Red berries, green foliage, yellow flowers, but blue? It's not actually very relevant.
Our eyes are most sensitive to green, somewhat less to red, and far less to blue.
A rabbit hole we can jump into, if you wish. :wink:
As an aside, I think there is more than a good reason to correlate any increases in mental health issues with the prevalence of artifical light. This is especially relevant in an age of mobile devices!
Edit Note: Reds and Oranges are known to increase appetite
The article "Russian blues reveal effects of language on colour discrimination" is about how people discriminate colours, not about how people perceive colours.
The article points out that in Russian there is no single word for the colours seen in Fig 1, and asks whether this means that Russians discriminate colours differently from non-Russians.
It seems certain that language does affect how people discriminate not only colours but observations in general. For example, someone looking at various artworks who is not aware of the concepts Modern and Postmodern will certainly categorise these artworks differently to someone who has learnt the concepts Modern and Postmodern.
It should be noted however that even through the Russian may not have a single word for the colours in Fig 1, and make the distinction between lighter blue ??????? and darker blue ?????, this is a similar approach to English that makes the distinction between cerulean blue and ultramarine blue.
Again, because a linguistic distinction has been made between colours, it does not follow that there is a perceptual distinction. For example, an observer's perception of colour 9 in Fig 1 doesn't change as its name changes. An observer perceives the same colour regardless of whether it is called ??????? in Russian, cerulean in English, bleu pâle in French or azzurro pallido in Italian.
The article notes that categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual colour task. This is understandable, in that someone not aware of the concepts Modern and Postmodern when looking at artworks and when asked to make judgements about these artworks will perform differently to someone who is aware of the concepts Modern and Postmodern.
The article also concludes that performance can be disrupted by verbal interference. Also understandable, in that is someone was told that a particular artwork was an example of Modernism when in fact it was an example of Postmodernism, their immediate, instinctive judgment about the artwork would clearly be disrupted.
There is the strong and weak version of the Whorfian hypothesis. In linguistics, the Whorfian hypothesis states that language influences an observer's thought and perception of reality, and is known as linguistic relativity. The strong Whorfian hypothesis suggests that language determines a speakers perception of the world. The weak versions of the hypothesis simply state that language influences perception to some degree. The strong version has now been largely rejected by linguists and cognitive scientists, especially with the development of Chomskyan linguistics, although the weak version remains relevant. The weak version does allow for the translation between different languages.
https://www.britannica.com/science/Whorfian-hypothesis.
Speakers of different languages can look at colour 9 in Fig 1 and perceive the same colour regardless of its name. They are able to perceive the colour with the "innocent eye" described by Ruskin. He wrote that it is not the case that we can only perceive something if we already know what it is. This would inevitably lead into an infinite regression of perception and knowledge.
This is in opposition to Gombrich who argued that there is no "innocent eye". He wrote that it is impossible to perceive something that we cannot classify, thereby supporting the strong Whorfian hypothesis. But today the strong Whorfian hypothesis is generally not accepted. It it were accepted, it would lead into another chicken and egg situation, in that we couldn't even perceive colour 9 without knowing its name, and we couldn't know its name until we have perceived it.
The article makes sense that categories in language do affect a person's performance, but this is not saying that categories in language affect a person's perceptions.
It's explicitly about both.
Quoting RussellA
That's explicitly what it's saying.
The introduction to the article writes that they are investigating discrimination between colours, not the perception of colours
Though of course, in order to be able to discriminate between colours 1 to 20 in Fig 1 they first they must be perceived. But this is not the topic of the article.
Kant's pure intuitions of time and space and pure concepts of understanding (the Categories) are not linguistic. The article is about linguistic discrimination.
Why did you say this? Because I quoted Kant on intuition and concepts? Then you have misunderstood.
Otherwise, you're failing to understand ... well, everything really. Have fun!
Ehhhh... yes, but no. But more importantly I'd say I'm persuaded to treat linguistic expression of the form "A is B" as a possible candidate for categorical language. It's one of the uses of the copula.
For purposes of this discussion it's fine to equate linguistic discrimination, like the Russian use of blue, with categories of distinction. At least I find it persuasive and any distinction which rests upon a difference between language/concept which rules out the study seems like special pleading.
Isn't it interesting that they have two distinct words for what we'd call "the same"?
That "the same" indicates some kind of categorization going on. Somehow these are related to us -- one is merely a relationship to another of the same underlying "blue". So they are "the same" -- that's the categorical use of "is"
And actually I think get gets along with my viewpoint so I'm rather inclined to accept it over a distinction between concepts and language.
I like formalisms not for the traditional reason (somehow describing a universal experience due to our cognitive structures), but because they are ways of explicitly differentiating traditions. Though I think one must be careful not to confuse the formalism with what's being formalized -- which is to say that there are going to be counter-examples to any given formalism; in the manner of family resemblances, rather than universal conditions of beauty, this is not a fatal flaw, though. It's to be expected.
But this view of formalism is definitely different. In some ways I just mean it as "strict and clear attempted articulations of a tradition within the form of or towards the universal"; the attempt is usually for something others can see as something, if not necessarily beautiful at least not boring.
The relationship between category and concept is interesting.
It seems that the Russians don't have one word for blue but have one word for pale blue ??????? and one word for dark blue ?????. However, in English, we also have two distinct words, ultramarine for dark blue and cerulean for pale blue.
It seems that English is more extensive than Russian in that we also have a word for "blue", which the Russians don't seem to.
As regards the copula, "ultramarine is blue" and "cerulean is blue".
This is the beginning of categorization. Violet is a visible colour, blue is a visible colour, cyan is a visible colour, green is a visible colour, yellow is a visible colour, orange is a visible colour and red is a visible colour. Visible colour can then be categorized into violet, blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange and red.
Ultramarine is not the same as cerulean. Ultramarine is not the same as blue. The word "same" is not used as a copula, as a copula connects two different things.
Each of these is also a pre-language concept in that we don't need to know the names "violet" and "blue" in order to be able to discriminate between violet and blue.
It is the fact that we are able to discriminate between violet and blue, as we are able to discriminate between pain and pleasure, that enables us to develop a language that is able to categorise these discriminations.
It would indeed be strange if we could only perceive those things in the world that we happen to have names for. It would mean that if we had no name for something, then we couldn't perceive it, and if we couldn't perceive it then we couldn't attach a name to it.
Sorry, but I think that's a stretch in relation to the other explanation that our upbringing, which includes the language we speak, will influence our perceptions and conceptualizations thereof rather than judging one language-group as having "more extensiveness", whatever that might mean, from the perspective of some pre-linguistic conceptual perception.
I think it's more that naming helps fix the mind on something, and remember it. If your visual field is filled with color, you'll remember the aspects of it that you have associated with a name.
For example, English has a word for "blue" that the Russians don't seem to have.
It seems in general that English has a larger vocabulary than Russian, possibly because many English words were borrowed from Latin, French and German.
Yeah, I think that follows -- it need not be explicit or clear, which I imagine is usual, but I can't think of any other way we can distinguish a painting from simply painting a wall some color because that's the color walls are (off-white).
Frescos might be a better example there -- surely there's a difference between the wall before the Fresco and after the Fresco, and we see the artistic difference even though the picture on the wall is not a painting on the wall hanging in a frame, but a Fresco (a kind of painting).
Yes, that's the gist of what I'm trying to get at with the idea of an aesthetic attitude -- looking at an artobject is to look at it as something aside from its presence, and aside from whatever role it may play within our own equipmentality. Something along those lines.
True, but you don't need to know the names of the colours 1 to 20 in Fig 1 in order to see them.
BTW, this is a documentary on the color blue. It's more fascinating than I would have thought. :razz:
Its highly relevant.
Imagine two abstract paintings of similar composition side by side on a wall. One of the paintings is colored with large blocks of black, white, red, and a little yellow. The other painting is only colored with large blocks of light blue and dark blue.
We may like the blue painting more but our eye will be naturally drawn to the boldly colored painting. Why would that be if we can look at paintings with a view from nowhere.
Quoting praxis
Meaning in CURRENT texts rather than the first historical instances? I read this as meaning the first written instances recorded across all records.
:up: A mix of Modernism and Postmodernism.
I wonder how they translate "Der Blaue Reiter" into Russian.
I don't know, but I betcha I know what color this building is painted: it's goluboy. This is Catherine's Palace in St. Petersburg.
If I remember correctly, they examined the earliest written documents in various languages and looked for color names. They found that across languages the order of appearance was the samered always showing up before blue, for instance.
We had made all the arrangements to visit, then covid-19 happened.
I read a biography of Catherine a long time ago. I'd love to go. Some other lifetime. :smile:
Right. When I asked Google in Russian what colour it was, the A.I. overview said, "?????????????? ?????? ? ?????-?????????? ????? ????-??????? ???? ???????," in which it says the facade is byelo-goluboy which means white and light blue (for want of an equivalent colour term).
Totally. And even though Adorno hated Heidegger, I see a lot of common ground between them (and you) on this score.
@RussellA, tho replying to @Jamal as a fellow in conversation whose saying things I agree with.
Well, you have two detractors of a sort. I've appreciated your creative efforts in proposing formalisms, but I think you've missed the point a few times now about the effect of language on perception, and even missed the point that I don't care if there's some difference between concepts/language with respect to this topic -- That Russians distinguish such and such means they see something different from us.
Perhaps their language is more extensive than English?
I'm tempted to say a "double" way -- at least if negation is allowed.
Still, if people agree that art is an end unto itself that's progress. Something aside from "use".
Quoting Leontiskos
Not true, even though "artistic" is a poor choice of words on my part.
A critic might say, "though the piece is obviously artistic, I don't care for it". This reads normally enough to me.
But "artistic" is a bad choice because it not only means "art-like, belonging to the category of art", there are strong positive connotations about quality. While the alternative "artsy" means "art-like" with weaker negative connotations. So I will just say "art-like".
"Someone who desires art will hold that what is more art-like is better than what is less art-like." Is clearly false. Better art does not belong to the category of art more than lesser art. Either it belongs, it doesn't, or it's marginal. Artists don't compete to create art that is more art-like, they compete to create better art.
Art-likeness is distinct from quality, and it, not quality, determines whether something is art or not. Do you agree?
I feel overwhelmed at the amount of responses, and flattered. I've been reading along with everyone else, but would you mind re-expressing the thoughts?
I ought not to have mentioned sex as an analogue now, I think. Two contentious topics can't clarify one another when they're both contentious.
My thinking in the comparison was to point to art has more than one intention -- it gets along with various "uses" and all that.
Sex is the same at least in the way that sometimes people do it for fun, and sometimes people do it for fun and kids. Two different intentions.
Quoting Moliere
By "singular way" I only meant that although art is an end in itself, nevertheless knowing this does not enable us to distinguish art from other things that are also ends in themselves (e.g. pleasure, friendship, etc.).
Are you saying that we want to be able to say what art isn't?
Quoting Moliere
I tend to agree with this. :grin:
Okay. Then, yes, we're in agreement.
Quoting Leontiskos
Naw. I was catching up on my replies and that's what I thought of.
Quoting praxis
How you leap from assuming such research represents our inclinations towards certain colours -- and then make a further leap to the quote above -- I cannot understand. What is this "view from nowhere"?
I don't see the sense in a strong Whorfian hypothesis, where language determines a speaker's perception of the world. It seems that a strong Whorfian hypothesis is not generally accepted in modern linguistics.
https://www.britannica.com/science/Whorfian-hypothesis.
Previously I wrote:
However I do accept a weak Whorfian hypothesis, where language does influence perception to some degree. Previously I gave the example:
The weak Whorfian hypothesis is supported by the introduction to the article
"Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination"
Could you say again what point you feel I have missed about the effect of language on perception.
Though the Russian speakers colour chart "How to Choose Paint Colour for Walls" lays out the colours exactly as we English speakers would lay them out.
https://forum.domik.ua/uk/kak-vybrat-cvet-kraski-dlya-sten-t29350.html
1) You go to school and you are taught how to use numbers effectively.
2) You do not go to school and your effective use of numbers is determined by experiential exposure.
The same goes for many things.
As I mentioned previously -- you may have missed it -- South Korean infants are taught Korean with their parents emphasizing Prepositions rather than Nouns. This leads to a small developmental period where are cognitively more proficient at spacial tasks but poorer at categorisation compared to other infants.
The Russian blue thing is just pretty much the same thing. Personally when I think of blue I do not imagine Sky Blue I imagine something akin to ultramarine (likely due to exposure). Habits make distinctions easier, I do not see this as necessarily causing perceptual differences but I have been of the mindset that languages most certainly differ and can influence how we perceive things.
@Moliere As above. My point being that a Painting and a Drawing are known habitually according to tool use. A Paint Brush is directed more often at a larger canvas than a Pen or Pencil. Also, a Pen or Pencil is associated with more rationalistic behaviour in academia, whereas a paintbrush is more of a household item possessing something of a heavier domestic quality. I am being more speculative here!
My other main point was how Paintings and Drawings are Static and encourage the audience to spread out in a spacio-temporal sense, where other mediums of Art (such as Dance, Film or Music) Collapse a spacial and/or temporal experience into a moment. This can get quite complex when you get into it and is something I have been mulling over for years now.
What you say seems sensible, and as I see it may be called the weak Whorfian hypothesis.
https://www.britannica.com/science/Whorfian-hypothesis
In the Renaissance, drawing was the foundation of all the arts. Giorgio Vasari said that drawing was 'the father of our three arts: architecture, sculpture, and painting.'
It wasn't until the 19th C Romanticism and Expressionism that painting started to take precedence to drawing, as being able to better convey atmosphere, mood and emotions.
This difference in priority between drawing and painting helps to account for the difference in styles of Andrea Mantegna and Vincent van Gogh, for example.
As you say, if prepositions are emphasized rather than nouns, the student becomes more proficient at spatial tasks rather than categorization. Similarly, if drawing is emphasized rather than painting, the student becomes more proficient at line and form rather than colour and texture.
All these are examples of the weak Whorfian hypothesis, where the language of the teacher does influence perception by the student to some degree.
:up:
Although there are plenty who wholly oppose this. I thought @Jamal was one but apparently not?
Quoting RussellA
Or if the Art World dictates 'Conceptual Art' as actually 'Art' more people will come to adhere to that view to suit the political landscape. Something like the obtuse writings of people like Derrida and Foucault who privately stated that they had to write in that style or French academia would not take them seriously -- tongue in cheek possibly, but I think there is a degree of truth in this everywhere.
Quoting RussellA
And of course photography was, to some extent, beginning to replace the need for formal paintings and drawings. Paintings have a historic weigh to them in terms of politicals too being used as pieces to display symbolism and even a sense of immortality in terms of portraits.
The whole period of Expressionism was influenced by the technological development of synthetic paints. Ultramarine once an expensive pigment become more readily available to more artists.
If you want to be part of the Artworld, and enjoy the glitzy parties, then as with Derrida and Foucault, you have to play the game.
I looked into it a bit further online just now and it appears that red, the first chromatic color mentioned in early writings across cultures, is strongly associated with blood. Given this correlation, it seems reasonable to speculate that if our blood were blue instead of red, for example, we might find ourselves more drawn to the color blue instead of red. Correlation is not causation of course, but this may indicate that red has more of an organic weight than a socially constructed weight.
Even in philosophy, I've wondered why red seems to be the go to example when discussing color.
Red/orange might be the earliest colorful (not black/white) dye used, from iron oxide.
Deeper down the rabbit hole, and assuming the AI is not hallucinating, iron is far more available than the elements which are historically used to make the other primary pigments, namely yellow and blue. Iron is also more bioavailable to species for the job of carrying oxygen in the blood. Iron is reported to be better at the job though some species use copper and vanadium and those critters got blue blood.
Red/iron has organic weight?
Red also slows time subjectively whilst blue does the opposite.
No worries, although I have lost the thread a little bit.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting hypericin
You've switched from a comparison to an absolute. What I said did not imply that an artist must care for every piece of art.
Quoting hypericin
I don't think it's a coincidence. What is less obviously art is less art, and what is more obviously art is more art. The semantics of "artistic" simply capture this, and it's no coincidence that "artsy" is much close to slang. Your idea that what counts as art and what counts as good art are two entirely separate issues looks to be mistaken, and one way to see this is by looking at our "notable point of agreement":
Quoting Leontiskos
-
Quoting hypericin
Again, your counterexample is not valid.
Quoting hypericin
It does.
Quoting hypericin
This is not correct. You've been asserting this over and over.
Quoting hypericin
Art-likeness is not a word, and there's a reason for that. You could make up a word for that which denotes species but not quality, and your statement would be tautologous. That's more or less what you have done.
Comparison to absolute? What does that mean?
It is not the artist caring, it is the critic. A critic can acknowledge that a piece is "artistic", yet not like it.
Quoting Leontiskos
How? I don't see it.
Out "notable agreement" speaks only to identity, not quality. It seems you can't stop conflating the two, if you think otherwise. Is the word "qualifies" throwing you off?
This was the exchange:
In order to give a valid counterargument you must give an example where someone who desires art holds that what is less artistic is better than what is more artistic. You didn't. You simply gave an example of someone who doesn't like a piece of art. You would have to give an example of an artist who is looking at two pieces of art, says that the first piece is more artistic than the second, and nevertheless holds that the second is better qua art. When we are talking about "better art" we are obviously talking about "better qua art." When you say that someone might prefer an artistically inferior meal to the Michelin meal, you are conflating 'better' qua art with 'better' in some other sense.
Quoting hypericin
So:
Quoting Leontiskos
On your account, how is it that these two things are true? If the two categories were neatly separate then why are they interrelated in these ways? This is the same question I asked at the bottom of .
Quoting hypericin
No, the problem is the word "barely," which implies that some things qualify as art less than others. You began using that word when you talked about, "barely belonging to the category at all."
Yes. To qualify as art less, means it only marginally identifies as art. Oatmeal, or a poo painting. This is not a value judgement, this is a statement about what the object is; that is, hardly art at all. You keep insisting that this is a value judgement.
Recall:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
Let's do another:
1c. Either some art is less art than other art, or else all art is equally art.
You can't have it both ways. You can't say that all art is equally art, and then say that some art is "barely" art, or that some art "only marginally identifies as art," or that some art is, "hardly art at all." Inclusion within the category 'art' is either absolute or its not. If "art-likeness [...] determines whether something is art or not," and whether something is art or not does not come in degrees, then "art-likeness" cannot come in degrees.
I don't want it both ways. When have I said that "whether something is art or not does not come in degrees"?
I think this is a boogeyman -- @Jamal has not claimed a strong Whorfian hypothesis, but noted how Russians speak of blue differently from English speakers.
And I said how, with respect to this topic at least, this is enough to say they see things differently.
To answer:
Quoting RussellA
Works well enough. You have a list of colors that Russians listed, but not an answer to why they distinguish different blues as something other than "blue" -- as @frank noted, "pink" is a good analogue here.
But I've been mulling all the thoughts together and thinking about them. They are rich, and I am thankful for all the interactions. I'm still jumbling through the thoughts and sorting them in order to reply and continue towards an answer to the titular question.
As regards this topic, I see things differently to you, and we are both English speakers.
We don't need to speak a different language to see things differently.
I agree that we don't need to speak a different language to see things differently.
I still think that the distinction mentioned shows how others see things differently from us.
At least to a point that we cannot say something as silly as "English is more extensive than Russian"
And so, for purposes of this discussion on painting and color, I will accept the example of Russian distinctions being different from English ones -- color is something we construct together.
It would be silly if that is what I had said.
What I actually said was "It seems that English is more extensive than Russian in that we also have a word for "blue", which the Russians don't seem to."
You left out the words from your quote "it seems that" and "in that we also have a word for "blue", which the Russians don't seem to."