For the longest time, art has been all about normativity: about how a person should think, feel, speak, and act when presented with “a work of art”. Hence the idea that two or more people can and should have the same “total imaginative experience”.
Is it up to you to decide?
An ordinary person who is not part of the artistic milieu has no say in the matter. Art is always a matter of the elite.
Fair enough. I can’t understand this as a criterion. It seems to be either a hope-for-result or a side-effect of the creation. The connection certainly doesn’t exist in the creation, so it seems extremely hard to say that my painting isn’t art until someone is moved by it. But also, I don’t think there’s a good definition, so I’m just discussing for fun now 
Sorry, I can’t agree with this statement. Creating art is accessible to all - every single human.
Good point. maybe it is in the potential to move another human being? Feelings guide the creation of the art, and once it is appreciated as art, then it comes to life
Certainly seems reasonable to me!
I think much of the issues around defining Art is the difference between viewing with an Artistic Eye and Producing Art. Anyone can look at anything with an Artistic Eye, but doing so does not make something Art in the broader sense of the term.
I think the test of emptying an art gallery next to some dumpsters and asking people what was and was not on display in the gallery can tell us a lot about how art is viewed.
I am generally opposed to calling all ‘Conceptual Art’ a kind of Art form. I think it is useful, but some is not what I consider ‘Art’.
The goal of conceptual art pretty much backs up this view too. It is a movement to purposefully atomise the definition of art to the point of its ‘essence’.
What are your thoughts on ‘the sublime’ then?
We used to thrash this one around.
It’s a question that’s never made the slightest difference to anything in my life or in my appreciation of any work.
I think the harder question, and your question is often mistaken for this one, is: What is good art?
People might look at a cubist work and pontificate, that’s not art! The common observation being, “My 7 year-old can do better.” But even if a work is understood as bad art, it is still art.
For many to call something “art” implies some kind of elevated status. I don’t share this view.
To steal from Rorty, art is whatever your colleagues let you get away with.
But what counts as good or great art? Anything you answer, the opposite may also be true.
I think the problem lies in comparing utterly different media and/or combos of media. There is a degree of subjectivity, but it is a ‘degree of’ as there are some boxes to tick. This deconstructionist approach of conceptual art is anti-art in a way. It is a contradictory endeavor, but a rather fascinating one from a philosophiocal perspective in my view.
maybe we can step back and talk about something called the “artistic experience” rather than just considering the final product.
Making art is after all a human endeavor. It draws upon our deeply held beliefs, creativity, imagination, powers of contemplation, and results in a need to express your vision, in the art (whether is is creative writing, or poetry, or visual art…) that creatively expresses a part of the artist’s truth.
I don’t think this is an “elevated” ability, but something accessible to every single human being. I think, it is in fact part of what makes us human - the capacity for creative expression.
Oh, very good point. This is a good one to use on the fine art students lol. I had about a six-hour debate with a handful of arts students I was apple picking with about 20 years ago about how to define art. They seemed to think planting a sunflower was art, because the intention was to create something beautiful. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why your quote here digs at the heart of that claim 
Yes, which is why bad and mediocre art is still art. Interestingly people focus on the audience of art most of the time but the experience of making art, even indifferent art, is a separate and important aspect of this discussion
I don’t have a problem with ready mades. I think we get close enough to a definition by saying that art is (almost) anything made visible or presented in a way that invites aesthetic or thoughtful appreciation.
Some people will talk about the sublime as being a factor here. I think that’s essentially an elevated way of saying that a work may generate feelings in certain people. Subjective. I get this from some classical music, not from any painting or sculpture.
Do you think people confuse craft with art? When I worked for an antiquities dealer who sold works via Sotheby’s this came up a lot. An object that was a quotidian piece of craft in 1700, may now regarded as an art object. Which suggests that things may not begin as art but end up that way. Is a brilliantly hand tooled pair of cowboy boots (for instance) art or craft or both and does the distinction matter?
I think when it is something novel, and represents the expression of something new, it can be classified as art. But beauty or aesthetic value alone cannot be the deciding factor. It must still represent something that the artist has felt.
Not sure I follow. A craft is less likely to be something new. And it may still represent a maker’s feelings. Personally I don’t know if intention or feeling matter in all cases. One can create art from skill rather than emotion. The emotion may be created by the beholder.
Not sure I follow. A craft is less likely to be something new. And it may still represent a maker’s feelings. Personally I don’t know if intention or feeling matter. One can create art from skill rather than emotion. The emotion may be created by the beholder.
Art is not just tooled by hand, but by heart and soul
Double post
I don’t subscribe to that. I don’t accept the idea of a soul, and the notion that one’s ‘heart’ is involved is romanticism. While I agree that some people experince feelings via art as they make it, I’d suggest that art can just as easily be produced through cold indifference and technical expertise alone. Some people might convince themselves that they can tell the difference, but that’s another story.
Tolstoy’s “infection” theory seems oriented toward the artist, not the consumer. Clearly Tom is correct that a viewer can be “infected” with an emotional response by technical excellence. Tolstoy would call this “false art” – and in one sense, he is right. It is false. But the consumers response is not false, and the work of art fails or succeeds based on that response, not on the integrity of the artist. When Tolstoy slammed Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Wagner, I think he was accusing them of this kind of false art.
Tolstoy (an inveterate proselytizer himself) also claimed that the best art should infect the consumer with “the highest religious feelings” or, lacking that, with feelings that unite people in a loving way. He slams Beethoven’s 9th for failing to do so. His critique of “KIng Lear” (here: Leo Tolstoy on King Lear | OpenLearn - Open University is a masterpiece of invective.
By the way, in “What is Art” Tolstoy also relegates his own great novels to the “second rate”. So competitive nature is not the sole reason for his critique.
p.s. Tolstoy enumerates four kinds of “false art”: borrowing, immitating, striking (creating effects), and interesting. “Borrowing” involves evoking feelings generated by former works of art, instead of “real” experiences. “Imitating” involves describing in exact detail (“photographic” painting, for example). “Striking” invoves contrast: light and dark in painting, or details of sex or death in literature. “Interesting” consists of historical descriptions, geographical trivias, or other “interesting” details that enthrall the reader, but are not “true art”. (Of course “War and Peace” is replete with interestingness.)
I’ll grant that “interestingness” shares more with non-fiction than with art, but all art builds on the techniques of previous artists. That includes Tolstoy’s stories which he considers “artful” (like “God Sees the Truth but Waits”). By the way, Tolstoy extols the story of “Joseph and HIs Brothers” from the Bible as the ideal literary art (unfortunately we have no comment from Leo about Andrew Loyd Webber’s version).
The idea that there is “false art,” and that the artist’s intention determines its value, seems to be romanticism or woo-woo. It also smells of Stalinism: next stop denunciations followed by arrests. For Stalin false art was anything he felt to be bourgeois, experimental, abstract, or modernist. But really, people create things, and other people respond to them. What possible use is the label “false” unless one is a propagandist of some kind?
Incidentally, George Orwell wrote an amusing takedown of Leo Tolstoy’s view of William Shakespeare in his infamous essay Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool. But really, I’m not much interested in what opinion brokers like Orwell or Tolstoy think about art.
It does interest me that some of us like to imagine that good or true art must have something virtuous or transcendental built into it.
yeah, no, that is not my understanding of art