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LaTigresse -> RE: Art (2/9/2008 6:15:44 AM)
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What a delightfully mind challenging question for my Saturday morning Aneirin, thank you.
I always say how much I love art so you would think I would be able to easily define it. On the surface, yes. But the more I thought about it and read other's points of view the more difficult it was for me to find a clear definition. I've been putzing around the house here, deep in thought. Finally I almost came to a "if a tree falls in the forest....." type of answer.
I will try to explain. Most visual art, photography, painting, is a reproduction of some sort of real physical item/s or place. Just because a photographer or painter reproduces them does that then define them as art? They were there before, sometimes almost exactly as represented in the photo or painting. So, as humans, we have the huge egos to say that because we saw it and reproduced it, made it art? hmmmmmmm.....
Example, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran painters and William Henry Jackson photographer, are famous for their works of the grand landscapes of the American west. Those vistas were there, just as beautiful, before human eyes ever saw them. To me, they were already art. Yet we only chose to define them as art when reproduced by humans?
Then I read on the thread, views that art is created by humans. Now I am confused, so I decide to go to wiki for a little definition of the word "art". I read "Generally art is a (product of) human activity,................." Then I am thinking okay, it IS what is created by human beings.
Unfortunately I kept reading and found this.."Visual art is defined as the arrangement of colours, forms, or other elements "in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, ...............The nature of art has been described by Richard Wollheim as "one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture" It has been defined as a vehicle for the expression or communication of emotions and ideas,..........(further on) Benedetto Croce and RG Collingwood advanced the idealist view that art expresses emotions, and that the work of art therefore essentially exists in the mind of the creator." and on and on with descriptives that do not necessarily require the hands of humans to have been brought into existance.
As an example, out here at my little farm on the hill, I see lots of really stupendous sunrises and sunsets. For me to say they are only art if I take a photo or paint them seems very self important and just untrue. It has an emotial effect on me no less than a photo or painting of it would, perhaps even more. Which is why part of that wiki bit seems to contradict itself, the Benedetto Croce and RG Collingwood bit, if art expresses emotions yet how can it only exist in the mind of the creator if it illicits emotion in the viewer, listener, etc.?
So now I am back to the whole "if a tree falls in the forest.........?"
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