Not the artists and the art? One could intended all manner of things, and never find a soul (metphorically) who is touched by it
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Can be configured. It was originally a lot higher than 20 and I must have reduced it when we were testing in November/December.
I may increase it again, to 60 or 100.
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Just checking that thumbs up still works…
What communication would not ecompass art based upon this broad definition. Would my response here be art, particularly if you identified with it, or perhaps more if it annoyed you and elicited that emotion. I do see where he limits the definition to “a human activity,” but why? Is that because the artist must intend something and a dog (for example) cannot, even though a dog can evoke emotion? And if it is intent, what of those things a person produces where I see art the artist never expected?
Yes, I suppose a love letter may be considered art … But I think it is understood that art is the product of a creative process …
As is mentioned in the quote about -
… by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words … by means of certain external signs
But what isn’t “a creative process”? I’m not asking to be difficult because I am of the belief that all is art and metaphor to greater and lesser extents.
What would be the lesser extent? the greater extent?
Comparison has been a significant method in art. One of the major art historians, Heinrich Wölfflin, famously displayed art works next to each other in order to compare and analyse their form and style in a scientific manner. This was around 1900 in Europe.
It was also a time when many intellectuals assumed that there must exist some psychological mechanism inside our heads by which individual aesthetic preferences or differences between cultures even could be explained.
I don’t think anyone has found such mechanisms, yet the idea of associating art with emotions became very influential throughout the 1900s. It thrived in modern art where certain colours or shapes were supposed to evoke certain emotions.
But unlike observable works of art, emotions are not comparable objects. Hence the aesthetic individualism, relativism, or nihilism even that characterizes a lot of contemporary art.
Eh, sorry for the long reply.
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An opportunity to see how the new forum deals wiht threading.
The “incomparables” mentioned are
We can compare the physical characteristics of two pieces of art, but as you say, emotions are not comparable objects - or at least the comparison is far more difficult.
So Collingwood’s definition appears inadequate.
As craftsman, I “create” when I produce something from a given model. The artist is more involved with the model itself.
The distinction is fuzzy from a cosmological point of view such as Timaeus.
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Collingwood was a British intellectual in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. I’m sure he read Tolstoy.
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Inadequate, in that it fails to be useable.
Again, how could we possibly know that one “total imaginative experience” is the same as another?
A minimum definition is: Art is the formal expression of human experience.
All art is a formal expression of human experience. “ART” fits expression into form: paint on a canvas; words arranged by metric and rhyme; scenes and acts; plots and chapters; bricks and steel; shaped clay; sounds of horsehair drawn across catgut; light and darkness on film, and so on.
It is formality that distinguishes art from chatter in the bar over beer. It’s formality that distinguishes a painted wall (Pantone orange 021 M) from the Sistine Chapel. It’s formality that distinguishes your untalented kid banging on a can from a drum solo at a concert.
If I start whining about this website’s design in formally rhymed iambic pentameter, does that make it art? Maybe not. Art generally gives a degree of gravitas to its subjects. Robert Burns’ “To a Louse, On Seeing One On A Lady’s Bonnet, At Church” isn’t about body lice; the louse is just the springboard. So my whining had better have some gravity to it, or it’s just fancy bitching,
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I like this very much. But, for it to be art, the expression must be appreciated by another? A connection must be made?
Kierkegaard said God is a second rate author. We want to do better.
Regarding a connection, there is an old theory about empathy from around 1870 that had a strong influence on later art historians and artists. See Wikipedia on Theodor Lipps.
It goes something like this: the artist projects his or her knowledge/emotions onto the object of perception, and that’s what other observers of the object recognize and empathize with (assuming they share the same or similar perceptual faculties as the artist).
For example, Botticelli’s famous painting of Venus was interpreted as if it literally expresses what Botticelli knew and felt about Venus. The painting is then not so much about Venus as it is about the painter’s psychology.
Another version is that the shape of a column of a building, for instance, is interpreted as if it literally expresses its effort to carry its load, as if the column was a living human-like organism.
Emotionally expressed individual opinions of taste became more influential than descriptions or analysis of facts. What began as an attempt to make art more scientific became a murky field of anything that goes.
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Like @questioner I like this a lot, but I agree with him. there needs to be an audience. As an apparent contradiction to that, there is James Hampton’s “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly.” It was made as a tribute to God out of discarded materials and wasn’t discovered until Hampton died.
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This is basically my own definition of art as well. Art is defined by the communication between the artist and the receiver.
Every attempt to define art by looking at the art itself fails, because you can easily look at something that nature created and say it possesses the same qualities as a work of art, yet it isn’t art.
And every attempt to define art by just looking at the artist and the process of craft fails, because it can’t distinguish why some creations are considered art and others just content or “products”.
And every attempt to define art by just looking at the reactions people have to art fails, because it falls into the same category as the first failure, that something spawned by nature can equally form the same reactions as reacting to art.
It needs to be defined as a holistic view of an intentional creation, and the experience of that creation. The non-verbal, indirect communication of an experience that the artist goes through, that cannot be verbally communicated, and instead only communicated by an attempt at transferring a thought and feeling directly through the means of a shared experience.
Art is a form of communication that we haven’t classified for our species as being a form of communication. But looking at the mechanisms of it, it is basically a form of memetic spread of ideas, experiences and emotion that transcends words and verbal communication.
Like, how do you share a story of your hunting experience so that the rest of the tribe fully understands the dangers and experience past the mere information of how to throw a spear? You craft a story, and you paint the walls of the cave with your emotional journey.
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Totally agree
And, of course, art does not necessarily have to be autobiographical. I’ve written lots of stories with characters very different from me, but I understood their journey, and put my own truth into them.