Art Lovers discussion
Monthly Book Challenge
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But Is It Art?: An Introduction to Art Theory by Cynthia A. Freeland
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I haven't read it, but maybe I'll chime in as interesting topics come up, if no one minds.
You're more than welcome, John! I'm sure you will have interesting comments.
I will read it if I can get it from my library.
I have got the book and have started it. I am excited to hear comments from participants concerning the different topics covered in the book.
I've read it, but wasn't particularly enthralled.
I'm waiting for it but should have it this week.We have a new exhibit at The Wexner Center for the Contemporary Arts where the exhibits are by Louise Bourgeois, Hans Bellmer and Pippi Rist and I hope this book helps me to get a handle on these artists before I lead my 1st tour.
It was sad when Louis Bourgeois died. I've loved her work ever since I was in middle school, when she was probably in her mid-80s. She seemed immortal.
I can't say I understand much of what any of these artists did/do although I do like Bellmer's dolls.
Bellmer makes me a little uncomfortable. I think his dolls are a little creepy. Maybe Freeland will touch on that.
Divvy wrote: "Bellmer makes me a little uncomfortable. I think his dolls are a little creepy."Absolutely. And that's what I like about them.
Donna wrote: "Just got my copy from the library."ditto
Random bloody thoughts. Some disjointed spin off ideas about ritual and substance in reaction to the 1st chapter.1. Paint. At one time, pigments all had natural origins, and were freighted with symbolic qualities and highly visceral surreal imagery, and Indian yellow (mango + cow = piss), mummy (really), chthonian origins, ores, oxides, earths, lapis lazuli for true ultramarine, and so forth. With the advent of modern chemistry, and the highly controlled and predictable substance, full spectral range, and modern color theory, the quality of paint has vastly improved, but something of the alchemical and sacramental mystique of the painter's palette has been lost.
Has this denaturing and regularizing of the artist's materials engendered a nostalgia for elemental bodily substances, especially blood?
2. I had in the back of my mind the idea of painting something with my own blood, and had an opportunity when I cut myself shaving. I rushed downstairs and added a few drops of blood, a skin of acrylic housepaint, some red gouache and charcoal, and suggested a kind of elemental abstract bloody angel. Didn't turn out very well, but it was an interesting experience; somehow, different than others. Interestingly red paint looks more like blood than blood when it dries: that looks like the classic pigment, iron oxide. And in a painting where the paint is allowed to drip vertically, isn't there a visceral feeling when the paint is a red, that you do not get with any other color?
3. I was interested in studying African sculpture, that some pieces get their beautiful patina from ritual use: blood, fat, feathers, or objects added in ritual fashion, such as nails. How does knowing this affect your perception of them as works of art? How does this relate to Picasso's designation of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as an exorcism painting?
If beauty is the object of art, why can't the landscape painter simply hang an empty frame outdoors, and invite spectators to view the sunset? Or a sculptor simply bring his undraped model to stand in the gallery?Doubtless, something very like those examples has been done by somebody somewhere, since the question is such an obvious and childlike one. However--and this is crucial--nowhere, whether admired or intensely disliked would such a presentation be interpreted in the traditional aesthetics of beauty. Instead, the question would be to search for a message of some kind. Isn't that funny though?
Beauty is only one of the reasons man makes art.
Ruth wrote: "Beauty is only one of the reasons man makes art."Yes I agree.
I kind of wanted to stir the pot though, and get folks chiming in with their alternative ideas.
So... such as?
And here's another good one. In some sense, even if we stick to the beautiful, a representation of an unbeautiful thing can widely be considered to be beautiful. That's sort of the flip side of the beautiful in itself, not being beautiful in art. (I was tepted to use hyphens there, but I don't want to spread the art-speak disease :) )Yes I know. Meaningful. Raising questions. Mysteries. Reimagining. Vision. Emotion. Altered Consciousness. Catharisis. Creation. The Sublime. Order and Harmony. Provocation. Lots of stuff. Many many other reasons....
I don't know though. This book seems to bring out the Socratic in me and make me want to raise questions instead of answering them!
I don't know, but I wouldn't imagine people look at a Pollock and think, "That's beautiful."
John wrote: "I don't know, but I wouldn't imagine people look at a Pollock and think, "That's beautiful.""Well actually, going back to Tom and Jack, Tom Benton said something to the effect that Jackson had "never made a painting that wasn't beautiful."
(He had a soft spot for Jackson, all right, he was willing to shed his put-on anti-intellectual anti-modern persona in saying that.)
Now I don't think he meant beautiful in the sense of pretty (although Lavender Mist seems to cross over the line a bit, one way you can read it is muscular tension, the other way almost feminine lacyness and delicacy of color). The colors are twisted and tortured a bit rather than being clean and scrubbed looking, as they are in a Hans Hoffman, and the forms are often stubby and anti-pretty, unlike the playful a and lyric line in a Gorky (picking two contemporaries for comparison).
But I think Benton meant something like sublime, emotional and poignant.
I was talking about beautiful in the sense of "pretty" or "aesthetically pleasing." If you pry open the word enough, you can get it to mean almost anything, which sort of defeats the purpose. And when I referred to "people," I wasn't really talking about the community of fellow artists.
John wrote: "I was talking about beautiful in the sense of "pretty" or "aesthetically pleasing." If you pry open the word enough, you can get it to mean almost anything, which sort of defeats the purpose. And..."More or less we may very well be in agreement.
Shows how treacherous the whole discussion is if we don't pay attention to terms!
By the way, to use your phrase, if you "pry open" the word "art" enough, "you can get it to mean almost anything, which sort of defeats the purpose" too.
I suggest that perhaps art is a "language game", using Wittgenstein's term. It could be a cluster of concepts that we can observe in use, somewhat connected, but having no distinct outer boundary--rather than having a fixed definition. Of course that leaves us all in the Humpty Dumpty category... ...a word is what you use it to mean... ...but maybe we can reach a consensus on some, but not all cases....
If lacking an outer hermeneutic boundary is enough to constitute a word or phrase being part of a Wittgensteinian language game, then I would be hard-pressed to find something that doesn't apply.
John wrote: "If lacking an outer hermeneutic boundary is enough to constitute a word or phrase being part of a Wittgensteinian language game, then I would be hard-pressed to find something that doesn't apply."It's a continuum, John. There's stuff that's hard to pin down, and there's stuff that ain't. (There's nothing that you can't make ερμηνεύς confusing to some degree, if you look closely enough.) The stuff that is harder to pin down is more appropriate to that approach. :D
Did you mean to use the infinitive form of ερμηνεύς there?
If we're going to use the ancient Greek, best to know how to use it. :)
what is beautiful always makes me think of the Twilight Zone episode about a woman(I think Janet Leigh) whose face is covered by bandages and when taken off the medical people are repulsed by her looks. Her face is beautiful but the medical personnel's faces are really ugly when they're shown for the 1st time.
I love that Twilight Zone!! If I recall correctly, the medical personnel all have pig-like noses.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.This saying first appeared in the 3rd century BC in Greek. It didn't appear in its current form in print until the 19th century, but in the meantime there were various written forms that expressed much the same thought. In 1588, the English dramatist John Lyly, in his Euphues and his England, wrote:
"...as neere is Fancie to Beautie, as the pricke to the Rose, as the stalke to the rynde, as the earth to the roote."
Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love's Labours Lost, 1588:
Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues
Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1741, wrote:
Beauty, like supreme dominion
Is but supported by opinion
David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742, include:
"Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."
The person who is widely credited with coining the saying in its current form is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (née Hamilton), who wrote many books, often under the pseudonym of 'The Duchess'. In Molly Bawn, 1878, there's the line "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", which is the earliest citation found in print.
Phase Finder http://www.phases.org.uk/meanings
Interesting, Caryl! Thank you for the research and the great information!
I wonder if Lyly was consciously copying Chaucer's Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales": "When that aprill with his shoures soote / The droughte of march hath perced to the roote..."
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" doesn't really ring true with me in determining whether something is Beautiful or not.Probably all parents think their children are beautiful but I think that we'd all agree that not all children are beautiful in an aesthetic sense.
To me there is a universal sense of beauty that most if not all human beings have regardless of culture, education or when they lived.
Since cave people, I think humans have always found some sunsets incredibly beautiful, lightning across the sky awesome, high mountians majestic, some objects sublimely beautiful.
Thus there seems to be a shared appreciation for the beauty of a thing by most of humanity throughout human existence and so I would argue that there is an ideal beauty that humans have for whatever reason.
Aesthetics . . . both Hume and Kant agreed that some works of art really are better than others, and that some people have better taste. But they differ on how to get there.[image error]
David Hume (Scottish philosopher 1711—1776)
Hume spoke of TASTE, which he saw as a refined ability to perceive quality in an artwork. Taste could be completely SUBJECTIVE. Hume said men of taste must preserve minds free from prejudice, but thought no one should enjoy immoral attitudes or vicious manners in art. Hume felt artists should support Enlightenment values of progress and moral improvement. Hume stated that judgments of taste are “intersubjective”; people with taste tend to agree with each other though they weren’t actually objective.
Immanuel Kant (German philosopher, 1724—1804)
Kant was more concerned with explaining judgments of BEAUTY. Good judgments in aesthetics are grounded in features of artworks themselves, not just in our preferences and us. Kant described our human abilities to perceive and categorize the world around us. Kant believed that judgments of beauty were UNIVERSAL and grounded in the real world.
Who do you agree with?
CONTROVERSIAL CONTEMPORARY ART . . . 
Andres Serrano in 2010 with Irina Movmyga.
Serrano (b: 8/15/1950 NYC) is an American photographer and artist who has become most notorious through his photos of corpses, as well as his controversial work "Piss Christ". Serrano is from a half Honduran, half Afro-Cuban background and was raised a strict Roman Catholic. He studied from 1967 to 1969 at the Brooklyn Museum and Art School, and lives and works in New York.
Serrano's work as a photographer tends toward relatively large prints of about 20 by 30 inches, which are produced by conventional photographic techniques. He has shot a vast array of subject matter including: portraits of Klansmen, morgue photos, and pictures of burn victims. He went into the New York subways with lights and photographic background paper to portray the bedraggled homeless as art objects, as well as producing sometimes decidedly kinky portraits of couples.
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Serranto Piss Christ, 60 x 40 Cibachrome print
Many of Serrano's pictures involve bodily fluids in some way—depicting, for example, blood (sometimes menstrual blood), semen or human female milk. Within this series are a number of works in which objects are submerged in bodily fluids. Most famous of these is "Piss Christ" (1987), a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's own urine. This caused great controversy when first exhibited. Serrano, alongside other artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, became a figure attacked for producing offensive art while others defended him in the name of artistic freedom.
The most famous and notorious of Serrano's work plays on the relationship between beautiful imagery and vulgar materials, his subject matter often drawing from the potentially controversial and, perhaps, the willfully provocative. Guardian art critic Adrian Searle was not impressed in 2001: he found that Serrano's photos were "far more about being lurid than anything else... In the end, the show is all surface, and looking for hidden depths does no good.” More recent work of his uses feces as a medium. (www.answers.com)
http://www.artnet.com/artwork/4248890...
Serranto. Heaven and Hell, Cibachrome print, silicone, Plexiglas, wooden frame 32 5/8 x 45¼in. (83 x 115cm.) Executed in 1984, this work is number seven from an edition of ten. Sold at Christy’s for $43,106 in 2002.
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Art critic Lucy Lippard.
Lippard defends Serranto’s work by the following:
1. Formal and material properties.
The size is huge for a photograph which is glossy & rich in colors.
2. Content (thought, meaning it expresses.)
His urine is meant to be seen as natural body fluid and not as something shameful. He is not meaning to denounce religion but instead to show how our culture is commercializing and cheapening Christianity and its icons.
3. It’s context or place in the Western art tradition.
Lippard states that his inspirations and artistic antecedents are to the Spanish tradition, pointing to Goya (1746—1828).
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In a period of convalescence during 1793–1794, Goya completed a set of eleven small pictures painted on tin; the pictures known as Fantasy and Invention mark a significant change in his art. These paintings no longer represent the world of popular carnival, but rather a dark, dramatic realm of fantasy and nightmare. Courtyard with Lunatics is a horrifying and imaginary vision of loneliness, fear and social alienation, a departure from the rather more superficial treatment of mental illness in the works of earlier artists such as Hogarth. In this painting, the ground, sealed by masonry blocks and iron gate, is occupied by patients and a single warden. The patients are variously staring, sitting, posturing, wrestling, grimacing or disciplining themselves. The top of the picture vanishes with sunlight, emphasizing the nightmarish scene below.
This picture can be read as an indictment of the widespread punitive treatment of the insane, who were confined with criminals, put in iron manacles, and subjected to physical punishment. And this intention is to be taken into consideration since one of the essential goals of the enlightenment was to reform the prisons and asylums, a subject common in the writings of Voltaire and others. The condemnation of brutality towards prisoners (whether they were criminals or insane) was the subject of many of Goya’s later paintings.
As he completed this painting, Goya was himself undergoing a physical and mental breakdown. It was a few weeks after the French declaration of war on Spain, and Goya’s illness was developing. A contemporary reported, “the noises in his head and deafness aren’t improving, yet his vision is much better and he is back in control of his balance.”
His symptoms may indicate a prolonged viral encephalitis or possibly a series of miniature strokes resulting from high blood pressure and affecting hearing and balance centers in the brain. The triad of tinnitus, episodes of imbalance and progressive deafness is also typical of Ménière's disease. Other postmortem diagnostic assessment points toward paranoid dementia due to unknown brain trauma. If this is the case, from here on—we see an insidious assault of his faculties, manifesting as paranoid features in his paintings, culminating in his black paintings and especially Saturn Devouring His Sons.
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Goya, Saturn devouring one of his sons, c. 1819-1823, oil mural, Museo del Prado, Madrid
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Also mentioned are Goya's sketches from Disasters of War-- one sketch above.
for more Disaster of War sketches: http://www.napoleonguide.com/goyaind.htm
Do you agree with Lippard that Goya influenced Serrano's work?
There is something wrong with a piece of artwork when the title is essential to give the meaning to the work.
After reading the first two chapters of "But is it Art" I had this recollection of a book I was given, but hadn't yet read, entitled "Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior" by John Frohnmayer who was the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts when the Mapplethorp photographs became a political and emotional hot button over public funding for the arts in the early 1990s. I am speculating that "good taste" and "aesthetic beauty" were the corner stones of the controversy.
Carol wrote: "Aesthetics . . . both Hume and Kant agreed that some works of art really are better than others, and that some people have better taste. But they differ on how to get there.David Hume (Scottish p..."
Kant all the way.
Geoffrey wrote: "There is something wrong with a piece of artwork when the title is essential to give the meaning to the work."How about the "Spanish Dancer" series of Miro'? There is a certain tension produced between the oddball somewhat fetishistic use of materials and the title.
Divvy wrote: "I'm not sure I agree with either."Hmm. As far as taste goes, I do agree that there is such a quality which you have or you don't, but that has nothing to do with aesthetic beauty. My example would tend to be someone like Thomas Kinkade. It may be elitist and harsh of me, but if you like his work, you don't have taste. And while I might agree that some of Mapelthorpe's work is in bad taste, it is nevertheless beautiful. Maybe because I judge a work as successful based on all three of Lippard's criteria and each of the three is highly subjective. I am not a fan of Serrano, but I am a fan of Goya, Mapelthorpe and Ofili. The latter three are firstly successful on a formalist level, IMO. The bodily fluids as material (there has been a tradition of such substances in painting for centuries), nor the subject matter really plays into that for me. Not sure if that makes sense...
I hope we will all enjoy this book! Have fun reading this month and feel free to join in the discussions!