I want to understand what art is, exactly. What makes something art

I want to understand what art is, exactly. What makes something art

Could someone recommend me a book that can tell me? And please nothing to do with philosophy of language

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Art
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Why dont you think about it yourself? Everyone changes the meaning of everything to fit themselves, so what I think is art could not be the same to you. That doesn't mean I'm wrong, neither that you're right, just proves that maybe there isn't right nor wrong. I think of art as something that provokes tought, that makes people have opinions about it, but I dont even know if that's what I trully think

The Art in Theory anthologies will give you some idea. Also just looking at (and reading about) all art, of all genres and media, of all styles or movements, through all time.

>"hey guise, anyone know the golden authenticity stickers they hand out for WORKSofART? Where are those again?"
>greek radio adverts
>jefferson davis highway 562-2533

Art theoretician here.

Art is personalised communication. its that simple. Its just communicating something visually which would take longer (or possibly be impossible) to appropriately communicate with words.

We started making art when we literally had no words to communicate what we were trying to say. We have retained that tendency. We used it to create universal symbolism (signage etc).

Get "The Artistic Ape: Three Million Years of Art" - that's a pretty good explanation of the situation.

I have this idea in my head that art has to be transcendental, otherwise its not art, its just design or illustration

To me design is visual communication and art is this magic/transcendental stuff

>Art is personalised communication.

You're a shit "Art theoretician" (pretty stupid to give oneself that title too.)

Also:

>The rose is without 'why'; it blooms simply because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself, nor does it ask whether anyone sees it.

this

>You're a shit "Art theoretician"

Go ahead and explain why.

What a stupid, fucking stupid, stupid phrase.

Artists may create for their own interests, but the vast majority do so for the consideration of others.

Flowers bloom for very specific scientific purposes - generally related to their survival. They are very definitely not without a "why".

RECUPERATED NEO DADAISM

>RECUPERATED NEO DADAISM

Any type of "Neo Dada" would have to follow a cataclysmic change in the status quo. The original dada was a deliberate attempt to divert the current trend in art from romanticism to futuristic experimentation in the aftermath of the trauma of world war one.

Seeing as post modernism scrutinises, warps and represents current events at a near live rate it would be difficult for such a movement to gain momentum.

In your study of art theory did you only get as far as the Lascaux cave paintings?

Are you not aware that Neo-Dada was an actual movement with international parallels in the 1950s?

*listens to The Swans song named "Trust Me"*

user. Certain people become like Streichhölzer. They only start burning if they are gestreicht. This is you, you can only think by reading books. Try overcoming your physical disposition of being a Streichholz and burn yourself out, like a fading star.

art just means to create. that's it.

I am, but I deny its qualification as an art movement. It was shallow and derivative, cynical and satirical - but in borish way. Nothing new came of it. Its a shame that pop art found its roots in such a shithole period of art.

Schopenhauer is the most interesting on the subject IMO. read his main work or get a commentary on his philosophy of art / aestheitcs

Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Proust, etc all influenced by it

or try Josef Pieper's stuff on art, festivity, leisure

your confusion is because art is now subjected to intellectualism. i'd avoid that entirely, do you really care why the piss painting of a chair is art? the intellectual context won't make you like it

Intentional arrangement of elements to create beauty, beauty being that quality which engenders reflective pleasure (pleasure in one's own pleasure)

This probably won't answer your question but I asked one highly regarded film director about the purpose of art, and he said that he doesn't know what art is in the first place. Over 30 years spent working on movies, cult status and countless awards and he doesn't know the answer to such a seemingly basic question. He only said that his movies should show what and how he sees things, and that's it, really simple.
There's also the book "What to Listen for in Music" by Aaron Copland (a composer) which I've read recently, where he stresses the fact that all theory and explanation in music is done only after a composer instinctively does something new and innovative.
I'm not necessarily saying that you shouldn't try to define and categorize art, but doing that is clearly not required for understanding or even creating it.

retards

almost, see
art goes beyond simple communication, its just an emergent phenomena in human psychology like spiritualism, can't be really explained as simply as saying "non-lingual communication"

>he doesn't know the answer to such a seemingly basic question
anyone who answers that question with a definite and confident response without hesitation is a retard. remember that

Most people say shit like "hurr durr art is arranging shit so that it looks beautiful."
If you really wanna understand the shit, you have to start from the beginning and trace the timeline of art and the development of the ideas that are involved.
With literature the saying is start with the greeks, with music it's start with the monks.
That means the franco-flemish, franco-belgian, carolingian, and bergundian schools; ockeghem, des prez, dufay, binchois, de vitry, machaut, perotin, and etc.
Then into baroque; bach, zelenka, biber, scarlatti, pergolesi (yes I consider pergolesi baroque).
Then classical; mozart, haydn, cherubini ... These mite be the only good classical dudes.
Then into romanticism and everything turns comparatively shitty, personally my favorite romantic era dude was bruckner.
And then comes the 12 tone shit, which only stravinsky used properly.
And then basically you are left with serialism and minimalism, from the serialist camp I like messaien, but from the minimalist camp I like part.
The progress of art is the progress of man himself, his ideas and his aesthetic and how he thinks they ought to relate to each other.
In my opinion the truest art is art that expresses universals through particulars.
So structure is absolutely instrumental, the romanticists kinda said fuck structure. I say fuck that.

This dude's retarded obv.

>In my opinion the truest art is art that expresses universals through particulars.

Isn't that a sort of pedestrian function though? Art cuts deeper than that, it has something to do with universality but it's deeply sensual.

I always thought art had a sort of gnostic function, it pulls off the veil of maya and instantiates higher truths in the lower world, and reminds us that we live in delusions and reflections.

Yes that's more what I meant. By universals I'm referring to spiritual things.

This is so fundamentally false I have no idea where to begin. What do you mean by 'nothing new' when you refer to Pop Art and its roots in Neo-Dada in your very next sentence?

Still lives do all that? Wow.

Well no, but still lives are not art. They're decoration.

wut?

No it's art, just lower on the hierarchy of genres.

Portraits don't reveal higher truths either but they have a function outside decoration.

There's a way to talk about art without resorting to Romantic-modern mysticism.

I don't know, I think there can be higher truths in the angles of someone's face, why not? The human form is the most evocative one of all for us. Some portraits are just functional, but to the extent they are the intuition that they're art seems to weaken.

>There's a way to talk about art without resorting to Romantic-modern mysticism.

I don't really think it's romantic, but I'm not sure what you mean.

Yeah yeah sure but it's not black and white, every thing has artistic value each to varying degrees. A portrait doesn't have to be -intended- to be an artpeice for it to have artistic value.
Even shit like salt shakers fall somewhere on the artistic spectrum.

>I think there can be higher truths in the angles of someone's face, why not?

Because one cannot reveal higher truths while mechanistically copying delusions and reflections.

I mean that a trajectory in art from around the Romantic period through to the end of the Modern concerned itself with hidden realities and such that was otherwise countered by Realism, Impressionism, Neo-Dada, Conceptualism, Pop Art, etc. that drew its meaning from life as it is seen.

Your favorite artist probably has their own answer. Start there.

At a point it was legally impossible to paint portraits (at least in France) without either being in a painter's guild or enrolled in the Royal Academy, but of course this was back when there was a state monopoly on materials. I think art has more to do with the history of art production (i.e. its institutions) rather than some sort of universality.

It's the only explanation that doesn't exclude certain genres or movements as 'non-art'.

art is a label for objects that are sources of pleasant experiences

>dildos are art

>Because one cannot reveal higher truths while mechanistically copying delusions and reflections.

Portraiture isn't just copying, though.

>I mean that a trajectory in art from around the Romantic period through to the end of the Modern concerned itself with hidden realities and such that was otherwise countered by Realism, Impressionism, Neo-Dada, Conceptualism, Pop Art, etc. that drew its meaning from life as it is seen.

I think mystery in art and the notion of higher realities is older than history.

it would be better to call a dildo a tool for pleasuring. my definition was pragmatic and your response is only pedantic.

There's no such thing as 'non-art' though, there is good art, bad art, and things that are called something other than art.
But the fact that for instance welcome mats are not called 'art' doesn't mean there is no artistic dimension to them, but only that they are more properly called something else because art is not the telos there.
Nevertheless, I can still inquire into the artistic worth of such things, but on no solid grounds can I say that it is bad art, because to do so would be rebuking an only accidental quality, whereas calling a real artpeice bad would be rebuking an essential quality which is its telos.
Let's not get all historical-critical, the question "what is art" is better understood as "what is contained in art" rather than "what properties does art have."

Yes it's also idealisation but not in the same sense as you would find in history painting, i.e. one that reveals higher truth through beauty. You're still basing the portrait on an individual.

>I think mystery in art and the notion of higher realities is older than history.

Sure but it took on new meaning after the Romantics. But even before then there were paintings of things that weren't concerned with higher truths. And the point was that there is art directly concerned with reality rather than metaphysics.

>There's no such thing as 'non-art' though

I mean specifically people saying a movement or style isn't art because it's just an intellectual circlejerk or whatever. Also I'm responding to what someone said earlier, that portraiture wasn't art but decoration.

'Non-art' in this sense is something like a craft that, in the end produces an object like a painting, but does not contain any element that would have it be considered art, like divine beauty, genius, illusionism, narrative, etc.

Or even that art cannot be art if it does not have form as an object. In this way one could argue the Conceptualists weren't artists but since they directly contend with issues regarding the art world and the gallery system, you'd have to make a strong argument not to include them. Or Rosalind Krauss's consideration of what makes post-modern sculpture actually sculpture at all -- that is is defined by what it isn't rather than the properties of what it is.

This is why I think the history of art is important in defining art -- it used to be that all arts were produced by guilds and Academies. Those institutions define what is made as art, from history paintings touching on higher truth down to still lives and genre scenes of everyday life. But also to consider are the crafts, since they found patronage by the same aristocratic class invested in the Academies. How is a carriage decorated with cherubim in the Academic tradition art, or not art? Its ties to the dominant class and the tradition from which the figures are drawn both qualify them, in some sense, as art. And as such art historians do study them (at a much slower rate than anything in the Romantic idea of art)

So, in my view, art can't be defined by any singular property contained within the 'art object' since a) art can disregard objects altogether and b) the framing of different theory, criticism, history, even law, at different periods of time as to what art is, is something that needs to be acknowledged if one is to attempt a definition of art.

>copulation is art.

You mean it appeals to your emotion. It can feel like it's more than that, but truly that is all it is.

it is when you're as good at it as I am.

>what is art
who fucking cares

>not getting the fucking quote

How can you be so damn fucking stupid?

an expression (of something)

Burke's essay on the beautiful and sublime

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Art

>This dude's retarded obv.
i love how people are ripping ths hit out of the art theorist - despite the fact he was the only one in the whole thread to give a comprehensive answer.

>art is a label for objects that are sources of pleasant experiences
have you ever seen a goya painting? Or a bosch? Have you seen Damien Hirst's "Mother and child divided"? Art is certainly not covered by your definition.

Comprehensible but not correct.

Comprehensive answer? His answer is just entry-level, high school, Facebook shit. It's literally crap for idiots who never read or care about art in a serious way. Something a dumb fake hipster would type out with his MacBook in a Starbucks. He started by saying art is "personalised communication", but only a moron would agree with that because then if you write a poem and burn it right away there hasn't been any "personalised communication" and that stupid-ass theory goes to shit. Does it stop being a poem because I burned it away? No, it's pretty fucking obvious. That conception of art is nocive and the root of many of modern art problems.

Judging art in those terms is stupid because the dudes who painted Altamira weren't trying to communicate jack shit. Art is art because it's the consequence of us humans being alive and doing shit, the rose is a rose because it blooms, like I said in and anything else is pure existentialis shit that goes nowhere, a circlejerk for "art theoriticians" like the poster.

Another debate is what makes "good" art, where you will have dozens of different answers depending on who you ask (Plato and Hegel have very different theories about what is "good" and "bad" art, for example.)

Your creativity is art. If you smear your shit on the wall, that's art. If you write 1,000 pages about "the necessity to return to an ordered understanding of the perennial philosophy," that's art. I would scoff at that gibberish, but nevertheless, it is art.

Art goes no deeper than your self.

Roses have fuck all to do with art.

also if you write a poem then burn it you were still communicating something to yourself. if not it was too shit of a poem to count as art.

How can you communicate to yourself? If you are communicating it, you know it, and therefore can't have it "communicated to you."

You seem like a pretty absurd person, boyo

Snob nobs make f-art-ificial visual and auditory noise: worthless noise.

Thank you for this.
My thoughts were basically that art is a meme, but i could not have worded it like you did.

I wonder if those certain people on here could one day realize, that they have a tendency to spill out thoughts, before letting new thoughts get in.
Only recently did i start browsing Veeky Forums, now i realise how this board utterly disappointed my expectations.

>"Letting thoughts in"

How's that schizophrenia working for you?

if the process of writing doesn't involve the writer gaining knowledge or understanding of either their subject or the aesthetics of language, then it's not worthy of being called art.

Can we stop posting these meme opinions on art please.

Is this a fedora parody or are you an authentic exemplar?

>

>poo7_orig.jpg

>Damien Hirst
>art
Truly new lows of plebsitude.

Yeah man, Magic the Gathering, now THAT is art.

Hirst is the embodiment of contemporary for-profit pomo pseudo art. And yes, a shitty illustration in a card game has more artistic merit than his entire body of works.

Emin > Koons > Hirst

Fuck yeah, the images are so epic they really make me feel like I'm fighting a huge battle with monsters and magic.

>I have no arguments to defend my complete lack of taste so let's keep pretending to be retarded

No I have arguments they're just not worth sharing on a board with people who think art is 'expression' or 'communication' LOL

>yer dum
Solid point. As expected from a Hirst lover.

Wow you're right, I wish I could prove my intelligence with an insightful and eloquent post along the same lines as
>Damien Hirst
>art

I don't even like Hirst but that is irrelevant to whether he creates art or not. Not convinced that he's an artist? Maybe you can wrap your head around this:
>Damien Hirst
>art

spoilsport.

>gets triggered by a colloquial hyperbole
>rambles about it instead of discussing the topic
>2smart4you
Are you actually a pseud or should I bother keeping this thread open?

You thought I liked Hirst and you think I'm saying people are dumb for thinking art is communication or expression -- if you're this bad at reading there's no point in you staying in this thread waiting for someone to give you a new opinion to claim as your own.

>more intricate yer dum
Fascinating how people who have nothing to say always desperately try to frame their own vapidity as others' fault.

you're projecting, hard.

Well that convinced me, Hirst is not art. Thanks for contributing to the thread.

>irony off the charts

Good, you sound like you belong on 420chan

>He started by saying art is "personalised communication", but only a moron would agree with that because then if you write a poem and burn it right away there hasn't been any "personalised communication"

Except where you are communicating that poem back to yourself for reconsideration - which is exactly why you do that sort of thing.
Art IS personalised communication because revision is a type of communication - you are clarifying something to yourself by the movement and rearrangement of information.

jesus christ, Emin? I met her in the nineties, shes a fucking idiot and her "art" is teenage girl wank fantasies.

but you HAVE heard of him, havent you.

I love how Veeky Forums are saying Hirst is a shit artist - you people should stick to writing, you have no idea about art.

Hes not a great artist, but his fame came from his entrepreneurship, his character, his tendency for troublemaking. He also trademarked an entire wing of "shock" art (disgust art really). Just because he did this for profit doesnt mean that he doesnt enjoy forcing people to face gruesome realities and have a great deal of skill in doing so. Art isnt just about hand eye skill anymore, it's about the person behind the art. Get over it.

Go and read some Bukowski you fucking noobs.

But not all personalised communication is art. Where is the line?

I seriously hope this is bait

Fuck, dude, I'll go ahead and tell you right now no one has a steady answer to this, at least one that doesn't rely on bankrupt metaphysics (see:Platonism) or simultaneously claim objectivity whilst feigning relativity (see: Adorno). Maybe the Chinese have a bit more insight on this. Your question brought to me Confucius' emphasis on ritual and ceremony.

I seriously hope you fucking choke on your vomit in your sleep you brainlet cuck

You're defending some shitty "shock artist". Nothing can shock us anymore. Pomo art is passé.

Your lack of intellectual integrity shocks me you disgrace

Art is not a quality inherent in a thing, but a way in which we interpret said thing.

Calm down, based Foucault.

> Art isnt just about hand eye skill anymore, it's about the person behind the art

Andy Warhol also said this about art when asked what it is.

He simply said that art is short for the word "artist".

He then gave some vague explanation on how words tend to get cut shorter but what he was really hinting at was that the artist himself (his persona) becomes a symbol of art.

You have to be trolling.

If I write "fuck you" on an internet board I'm communicating with you and said communication is personalized. Is "fuck you" art? What a fucking dumb description of art you gave that means nothing. Under your definition, thoughts can also be art because you're "communicating with yourself." Can you not see how dumb your definition of art is? You are giving a definition that makes everything fall under the category of art and, therefore, nothing is art anymore.

And not to mention the stupid notion of "communication" you gave, where nobody is communicating fucking nothing with none.

Is this what you guys are being taught in American universities? No wonder your voted Mr. Cheeto into the White House.

It's communicative - art has something to say through it's form.

This could be anything for good or ill, and such art could be good art, or bad art, or mediocre art.

I shake my head whenever I hear someone trying to denigrate something by calling it "Not Art".

As if something being "Art" made it virtuous or good.

It's a shout in the street.

You are all shouting.