What is art?

[Asher Kelman]

I would like to offer my idea of what the nature of art is.

Art is some entertaining and communicative creation of man whereby some intent of the maker is carried with the work. It may be extraordinary by it's beaty, patterns, workmanshift and craft or else by the ideas it promotes celebrating or challenging ideas current in that society. It evokes a recapitualtion of feelings, reactions in viewers, each informed and so tuned individually by their own personality, education and experiences. Art which is more impressive tends to create a necessity to revisit and reexperience and promote and even a desire to possess rendering that art to have commerical worth. This latter process, powered by the art community allows some works to become commodities like money and popular like superstars. That in brief is what art is to my way of thinking.

Asher

[lostcoyote]

that's pretty good asher...

here's one - if it has not already been mentioned...

art is art in the eye of the beholder
value begins and ends there

[Asher Kelman]

that's pretty good asher...

here's one - if it has not already been mentioned...

art is art in the eye of the beholder
value begins and ends there

That sounds good and at first blush is reasonable.

Well I can pretty well agree with your first line that "art is art in the eye of the beholder", (except I'd say it's more experiential, multi-sensual involving far more than eyesight and visual sensory appreciation, and I'm not intending to be merely semantic).

The "Value", you mention, however is so much more complicated.

First there is the individual. He/she may need some experience or knowledge to sense, acknowledge or appreciate value and that therefore is very dependent on what factors are involving that persons life, how they feel at that time and where they are at.

The art museum or curator might look at the work based not on what they see but on what the work is as part of similar works or works that went before or followed.

A gallery or collector might simply value the work according to how much money it might fetch on resale as the work becomes a commodity. There what the owner sees in it with his/eyes is not as important as what value the market perceives ir represents as an investment.

So there is art, that we appreciate starting with what we see and feel and then art that is important in our culture and then art we can potentially make money with which I call ART there the word "value" is mainly driven by market-makers and marketers not necessarily aesthetic values that we might want!

[lostcoyote]

i didn't mean to imply that value was a one way street hinged at monetary value, although that is certainly a value people agree upon...

there is sentimantal value, asthetic value, emotional value... etc...

i wonder tho, do all of these qualifications of values still reside within the beholder and what has come to influence the beholders beliefs about values?

[Christopher Nisperos]

I think there are two possibilities, and one doesn't necessarily deny the other...

1.) It is art if the person who creates it calls it art.

2.) It is art if the audience considers it art.

Beyond that, there is simply the critic's taste in art. So Kincade's work is art if you consider it art, in much the same way a dog turd is food if you eat it...

Excellent. This is similar to my traditional response to this pointless question. What is art? Who cares! If a person —ostensibly, an "artist" (if, as Mark points out, he or she wants to call themself that)— creates something which someone else subsequently appreciates as art ... then it is art ...at least for that person and for whomever else appreciates it as art. Before that instant in time, it doesn't exist as such. Period.

Even dog turds, by the way, have probably been presented as art (if not food*). I supposed it has had its appreciators. Problem is, how to frame it?

Best,

Christopher
(PS* I once had a girlfriend whose cooking could have been described as "art" under this definition. Thank god for Swanson's frozen... on the other hand...oh, nevermind)

.. .. .. .. ..

[Alan Davenport]

Back in the halcyon days when everyone KNEW what art was, artists (guys like Da Vinci, Rembrandt, et al) usually had a wealthy patron who paid their expenses and kept them fed. If the artist's patron didn't like what the artist produced, the artist would no longer eat. Thus, artists quickly learned that "art" was whatever the patron liked.

Nowadays, we have taxpayer-supported art associations and, in Oregon, legally mandated expenditures (1% of new construction for public edifices) for artwork. Therefore, as a bona fide taxpayer, I am a patron of the arts.

Ergo (see para. 1,) if I like it, it's art and if I don't like it, it's not art.

[Gudmundur Ingolfsson]

Some things are better not defined. Some forty years back there was a media guru a
Canadian named Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage) that said "Art is anything you can get away with", but Mr. Keath Richard of The Rolling Stones said
"Art is short for Arthur"