Innovation

So how does innovation differ from its little brothers, creativity and imagination. Well, Imagination is fluid and constant. Creativity is narowwing the focus of your imagination with a pupose in mind, some sort of creation, and an innovation is the creation itself, the newness and ingenuity of creativity, paired with utility to create something new and useful.

Creativity and Imagination

The relationship between creativity and imagination was brought up in class. I believe thaat Imagination comes naturally and consistently to the human subconcious. These are ideas and concepts that have little to no ties with reality. When one decides to use there imagination for some pupose, we begin to use our creativity. Creativity solidifies a new idea into a concept that be applied with a pupose in mind, in a way that has not been thought of before

Can Art Emote?

Can a song be sad? According to Piper, no the tones themselves cannot be sad, they do not have that quality merely built into them. And I agree. A certain combination of tones can evoke sadness, and therefore associate that combination of notes with sadness. We then perceive the emotion the artwork is supposed to invoke, but it is to be stressed that the artwork doesn't possess these emotions. That is what Piper refers to a fetichizeing the art oblect, or believing it to be more than it was intended. Our perceptions affect how we experience art.

Performances=Unique

It is really nice to hear something about the performing arts, as previous authors have seemed loathe to broach the subject. Piper however delves into the subject, saying that the people ARE the art. And so each performance is unique unto itself because it holds different possibilities depending on the performer. The mysteriousness of performance art distinguishes it from art objects in that you cannot fetishize the performance. The people are the art

Conferred with a Catch

So which is better, to have a status conferred upon you, based on mandatory prerequisites, or simply constituting. Well, is seemed to earn a status has the more powerful edge in that it calls for the acceptance and recognition of others. However, I believe it is imperative that those doing the conferring, that is, those in charge, are constantly being tested themselves, so there is no room for slacking in any direction, and hopefully, makes they playing ground a little more equal.

Humans, not Artifacts, Thank you!

In class, there was a point raised about humanstechnically being artifacts, in the sense, that our parents made us, society shapes us, and as we grow older we have more and more control over our appearances and choices--we MAKE ourselves into something. Well, while I agree with these things, I cannot agree with the sugestion that humans are artifacts. Aftifacts are human crafted objects which are used to serve a purpose. Everything from the paint on the walls to the hormones in our food was create to perform some necessary function. As far as I know, there are no shortages of humans anywhere, and other than increasing the population, which we would be doing anyway, we would not be serving a function, not created for some purpose.

Isness

Danto's theory and use of the word "is" is somewhat interesting. While is normally helps us refer to an objects state of being i.e. "the ball is round," at any given time, we find it insufficient to merely say "the ball is" as this only conveys the balls existence. What Danto does is he uses the word "is" to separate an object from an art work. To say something IS art is to say that though it may contain properties of an mere object, it has its place in the artworld because some kind of artistic theory has been applied to it, and therfore it IS art. While I don't necessarily believe this, because according to Danto anyone who understands art theory and history can confer this status, it is nevertheless an interesting concept.

Goodman and Exemplification

I liked that Goodman held his theory on par with the formalists, while slightly in opposition. Yes form is important, but only when it encourages some kind of recognition within the observer, either memory, emotion, understanding, what have you. It is still refreshing, however, to not see form nor representation glorified.

O, Hume.

Hume seems to be unable to convince even himself that art can be judged based on both taste and objectivity. This could be an interesting point, however, Hume starts claiming that all tastes are correct, by nature and definition, but some tastes are better, or more qualified. This starts to tread some dangerous elitist ground, and is also very difficult to support logically and fairly, which Hume also fails to do. Even when the reader thinks the objective judgement of art will be his saving grace, Hume continues to dance around this theory, saying that some artworks are inherently better than others, and only those with selective judgments can really differentiate.

I thinks this is a big mistake. To say that certain artworks just ARE better is pompous and unfounded, since what is valued changes from group to group, from era to era.

Art as Family

Weitz’s statement about having no criteria for art is something particularly of interest. Since it is society and the culture therein that decides what is art and what is not, the true definition of art is completely insubstantial and transitory. Several movements throughout the twentieth century have rejected the accepted criteria for art and created things that very few today would deny is art. The DaDa movement of the early nineteen hundreds is a prime example. What is Dada? Even Dada didn’t know what DaDa was, yet it was and it was most certainly art.
But all this proves that until the criteria of art expands to include movements such as DaDa, they simply remain undefined, without falling into the category of art or not-art. They simply exist. What a world we could live in if all art were simply allowed to exist without being judged by a social elite as to whether it is worthy of the title “Art”.

Representation

Bell’s discussion of representation seems to be hinting at, in a somewhat obtuse manner, a very true thing. Art should at all costs avoid representation. Representation is meaningless. It is embodiment that truly counts. For example, a man spends two years painting a picture or a chair, pure and simple. Upon the completion of the painting, he shows it to his friends who immediately laugh at him for his foolishness. “What good is this?” say his friends. You can’t sit in it, you can even put things on it. The representation of a chair gains nothing. However, if that same man embodies the meaning of that chair through his painting and imbues each brush stroke with the importance of that chair to him, than his friends would never be able to mock him. “I know that chair.” They would say. Or perhaps “I once owned a chair quite similar and it meant the world to me”, or even “That chair looks like what rest would be if rest had physical form.”
Representation is hollow and useless and should be met with ridicule. Art has a power that can reach beyond representation towards true incarnation, and therefore anything less is a failure.

The particular, the Peculiar, and Aesthetic Emotion

Bell quite accurately discusses the concept of an overarching aesthetic element that is common to all art. There is something that is innately presentational about art, no matter how interactive or affecting the piece may be. That is what makes art, art. It is separate from the daily, from the mundane. It contains this precise quality of an aesthetic. Whether it was intended or not, every piece of art has an aesthetic, whatever it may be, and therefore all art has a molecule of cohesion with all other art. Go Bell. Good Call.

Creative Expression of an Experience

Allow me to disagree here. Art is neither formulaic, nor goal oriented in nature. It may begin with a plan, however, just as with battle strategy, the plan doesn’t last past the first engagement with the enemy. Whether you try to control it, or whether you allow it to be improvisational and fluid, any piece of art is going to adapt and change throughout the process. Therefore the “fulfillment” of the finished product may have little to no resemblance to the intended, or planned, outcome.
A far better statement than art being goal oriented is that art is process oriented. It isn’t the applause at the end of a theater performance that fulfills the participants, but the arc through which the characters and the audience travels. This is similar to the fact that the rehearsal process is far more crucial and fulfilling to a performer than the actual performance, because it is therein that true discoveries are made, many of which are completely unexpected and therefore could not have been planned. A structure is necessary, true, for much of art to exist at all. However, as vines winding themselves around a truss, the freedom of a Bacchanalian exploration of thought, feeling, expression, and emotion, must be integrated into that structure for anything beyond a clinical shell of the motions of art to exist.

Freud's theory on...Art?

Freud has been revered for a very long time as a highly influential member of the psychological, and therefore the artistic and philosophical, worlds. However influential he may have been, and whatever doors he may have opened to others who followed him, Freud’s theories are generally regarded as oversimplified and generally groundless. With the exception of his breakdown of the psyche into the Id, Superego, and Ego, most of Freud’s principles have been outright disproved or attributed solely to the fact that he did enough cocaine to numb a small herd of elephants and had more issues than most of his case studies.
With that said. He oversimplified art and did what he usually did with all his other studies: tried to make it fit into his model with rational sounding, but insubstantial evidence.

Beauty vs. Pleasure....Reason vs. Emotion

“The definition of a beautiful woman is one that loves me.”
- Sloan Wilson
As Mr. Wilson clearly demonstrates here, beauty is transient. In a world where anthropology tells us how often obesity was held as beautiful by previous cultures, where the male form was upheld over the female form, where extreme piercing and gauging of cartilage is a common practice, there is no simple way to say that beauty is linked to any one physiological or psychological response. Pleasure is a very dangerous criterion to base beauty on. Especially since some of the most beautiful things in this world can be characterized by the pain that they cause. Admission of fault or failure, the ecstasy of grief, the finality of death, are all beautiful things that cause little or no pleasure to the actor or the observer. Therefore, beauty must be something entirely different. Since it seems so transient, and we are continually exploring things as counterintuitive as the beauty in the grotesque, perhaps beauty is something more akin to the act of connecting to something conceptual, something behind the imitation that Plato held in such disdain.

Communication of Emotion

As I’ve stated several times before, art is a powerful form of communication. And Tolstoy’s discussion on art as more than the mere expression of emotion is quite cogent. However, his ideas tend to imply that the communication is transference of emotion rather than a communicative dialogue. By portraying anger, the artist doesn’t necessarily have to be meaning the communication of anger. Rather, he opens up a channel for a mutual dialogue that may extend to several types of emotions and paths of thought. Successful art is less a simple communiqué and more of an invitation to dance, each participant, artist and audience, contributing his or her emotional steps to the overall movement.

Art as Imitation

Art is imitation. It is impossible for it to not be. Too often art is revered as something sacred, when in actuality, art is the conduit through which something sacred is touched by humanity. Art simply imitates the idea that it represents. Even in the most purely expressive forms of art, connected most directly to an intangible concept, art is still just that, an expression of something else. To say that the forms that art takes are also limited to imitation alone, however, is a statement that has been proven false. It is undeniable that when dealing with things such as theater or painting or music, there is a trend of adherence to form simply because “that is how it is done”. Yet even working within conventional forms, as long as the intangible, the divine connection is current and accessible, the art is attaining the nearest thing it has to avoiding imitation. Art can avoid imitation of itself; however by its very nature, it can never avoid imitation of the divine.

Perception

More important than an optical illusion that somehow tricks our minds into thinking squares are different colors or that one object is larger than another, is the commentary made by these things on how our perception can have a definitive effect on our interactions with the world around us. Will we somehow treat the square on the left different from the square on the right because of our perceived difference in the color? Do we prefer to be sinking in the ocean or falling into the sky when dealing with a horizontal line? And what does the answer to that question say about who we are as people. Pure objectivity is simply impossible due to the fact that our perceptions are our only conduit to the world around us. However, by examining our patterns of perception and attempting to hold onto an openness to varied perception, we may better grasp the truth of a grander idea that an art piece may be hinting towards.

What is Art?

Art is communication. Art is affection and affliction. Art is a mirror, and the image reflected back, and the light that does the reflecting. Culture does not exist without art. Whether it is the art of theater, the art of painting, the martial arts, or even just the art of communication, art must exist for people to have any kind of identity. It takes forms that may be very strict, as in the great classical painters, or the sweeping Wagnerian operas, or it may also exist in an amorphous and nearly intangible state of Bacchanalian chaos. Whatever its form, art distills something that is inner, something that is purely energetic, some might say even divine, within us, and manifests it so that it can be shared and given life outside of the individual or individuals that created it.
However, just as art is the manifestation of an inner spirit, or Mana to use an aboriginal Mexican term, it is also the action of tapping into a concept or spirit that is outside of oneself, that is greater than an individual or a single cultural context, but rather is shared on a human level and therefore universally communicable.
Art is an epic film with millions of dollars of financial backing, and it is the found object puppet piece that uses a pencil and a bottle to tell an improvisational story to a single child.
Art is expansive and restrictive. It can be something that seeks out the unifying aspects of all people, or it can be the defining lines of an isolated society. It is a herald and a catalyst of social change. Art is the Revolution. Art is institution and the convention, as well as the dissident and the experiment. Art is love incarnated with an arm made of hatred and an elbow made of ignorance and a wrist made of clarity, a foot made of wanderlust, two eyes of curiosity, a stomach of understanding, two palms of compassion, and genitals of desire. Art is what you make it and art is what art makes you. Art is good, art is bad, art is ugly. There is no substitute for art. Art is a prostitute. Art is a pimp, our President, and the bag lady in the alley. Humanity is art. I am art. You are art. And this post is most definitely… art.