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June 15, 2024 5:49 PM Subscribe
This volume thus builds upon growing art historical, anthropological, and historical literature that argues that âartâ is far from a natural category of human endeavor, but instead represents a historically specific idea and practice emerging in Europe from the Enlightenment and its aftermath [:] the radical and unprecedented bifrucation of the artist, as the genius who produces things of beauty, from the skilled artisan or crafts[person] who produces useful objects. [whatâs the use of art?]
"The ways in which decoration and ornament are defined and used vary in different cultures and periods. The Renaissance in Western Europe elevated to supreme status the âfine artsâ, demoting handicraft and ornament, and beginning a process whereby these latter were relegated to the status of âapplied artsâ... Centuries later in Britain, William Morris (1834-96) criticized the separation of art and craft from daily life and helped to promote a limited revival of medieval handicraft. More recently, a re-evaluation of ornament in art history has begun. In The Meditation of Ornament, [gbooks] the historian of Islamic art Oleg Grabar discusses ornament in the art of Islam within a broad world-view, ranging from Chinese calligraphy to contemporary art. Grabar proposes that ornament functions as an intermediary, enabling a direct encounter between the object it adorns and the viewer. He provides examples from different cultures, and suggests how terminology expresses the concept in different languages. For example, he notes that there is a Sanskrit word bhusati, which means âto adornâ. It implies the successful completion of an act, object or state of mind. Grabar comes to the conclusion that âin several highly literate and articulate societies, [there is agreement] on the existence of an action that completes something, that makes it perfect. That action is to decorate and the medium of its effectiveness is ornament.â"
[Kazari: Internet Archive]
previously: Egypt, repatriation, repair, I love how worked-over the first page of Nineteen Eighty-Four is, secret, ways of seeing, lists, equally an observer and an experimentalist, the only enslaved artist working in colonial America whose paintings are known to have survived, a Soviet nonconformist artist, exotic birds â including parrots, a recurring symbol in historical painting â and gigantic butterflies, tap, Very weird framing on this, it's a mix of science [laminar flow, Bernoulli] and woo [humidity, cloud-cover], the evolution of word balloons, care bears forever, suggesting that video games should incorporate more poetry, Art making is just one way of many through which we can transmute the unimaginable weight of loss into other forms, transformer architecture, wrappers delight, thousands of pieces of delicate glass created by a First Nations artist, Yhonnie Scarce, to tell significant stories, âpoorlyâ animated juggling, esoteric phenomena, works "in the style of", Folly Cove, sketchbook hoboes, the child in the foreground is shown at work, erasure in portraiture, obsessions, art colonies, Tolkien, Botticelli, celebrities, serious work attempting to convey a sentiment, Charlemagne, skull trumpet, game as argument, videogames might be art but can they be literature, a testament to the power of vision, determination, and the belief that African stories could shine on the global stage, to combine colors as in a painting, juxtapositions when you put his pieces side-by-side can be as strange as the items he's composing together in the individual pieces, rainbow rice seedlings depicting sleeping cats, whiteness (which he describes as the way we organize and are organized), twined cattail leaves, web vibrations to interpret worldly signals, no viewer should be aware that any art project was happening, Software Piracy Birthed an Underground Art Scene, one foot in reality and the other in fantasy, micro-details of things, sand drawings of Vanuatu follow principles from a branch of math, leaf art, an impresario of the experimental in a city, Art + Climate, chef, vaporous worlds, this lost copywriting art, MAiZE, âinfluencer artistâ, the radical story of Palestinian embroidery, artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if itâs scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways, itâs possible to believe in a happily ever after for us, most stylish older people donât follow rules, recipes knit our past with our present, hold on, a canvas for the art of living simply, craftivism, ornithological art, a time when children are living in peace, documentary, the most successful flop of all time, The "fuss" is that all of this AI art is built on the backs of people who remain uncompensated., somewhat gothic art direction, painting transmits rhythm, Ady Fidelin, the oldest known depiction of the bee in art is The man (or woman) of bicorp an (at least) 8000 year old cave painting in the Coves de l'Aranya, cozy game, stained glass sundials, Queer independent wrestling is where it is at, dematerializing, imaginary worlds and fantastical creatures, accessibility, Soteriologyâthat is the branch of theology that concerns itself with salvationâ, lunar codex, retired playground animals, wombat â that "most beautiful of God's creatures", Clone-a Lisa, Ismail al-Jazari, the "father of robotics", done with comics but never art or the revolution, MLB players develop their autographs, say gay, not doing their art was costing them timeâ, a world-class destination for art, but now weâre so much more, an incredibly ambitious title to pursue when many video games do not try to engage with having cultures or identities outside of the white/western represented, a sound collage, Uplifting neurodivergent joy and caregiving are important acts of resistance , Chief Hacking Officer, art exists everywhere, the new searchable (and playable!) web frontend, all sorts of angles on how games and fashion converge, one player will make it to The Center, art helps, strategic use of nonviolent disruptive tactics, âmoments of being,â âvigorous compressionâ, enjoying music, an archivist's dream...
a while until the end of the blues (400+ pages to go) yet i feel comfortable saying: art means many things to many people
"The ways in which decoration and ornament are defined and used vary in different cultures and periods. The Renaissance in Western Europe elevated to supreme status the âfine artsâ, demoting handicraft and ornament, and beginning a process whereby these latter were relegated to the status of âapplied artsâ... Centuries later in Britain, William Morris (1834-96) criticized the separation of art and craft from daily life and helped to promote a limited revival of medieval handicraft. More recently, a re-evaluation of ornament in art history has begun. In The Meditation of Ornament, [gbooks] the historian of Islamic art Oleg Grabar discusses ornament in the art of Islam within a broad world-view, ranging from Chinese calligraphy to contemporary art. Grabar proposes that ornament functions as an intermediary, enabling a direct encounter between the object it adorns and the viewer. He provides examples from different cultures, and suggests how terminology expresses the concept in different languages. For example, he notes that there is a Sanskrit word bhusati, which means âto adornâ. It implies the successful completion of an act, object or state of mind. Grabar comes to the conclusion that âin several highly literate and articulate societies, [there is agreement] on the existence of an action that completes something, that makes it perfect. That action is to decorate and the medium of its effectiveness is ornament.â"
[Kazari: Internet Archive]
previously: Egypt, repatriation, repair, I love how worked-over the first page of Nineteen Eighty-Four is, secret, ways of seeing, lists, equally an observer and an experimentalist, the only enslaved artist working in colonial America whose paintings are known to have survived, a Soviet nonconformist artist, exotic birds â including parrots, a recurring symbol in historical painting â and gigantic butterflies, tap, Very weird framing on this, it's a mix of science [laminar flow, Bernoulli] and woo [humidity, cloud-cover], the evolution of word balloons, care bears forever, suggesting that video games should incorporate more poetry, Art making is just one way of many through which we can transmute the unimaginable weight of loss into other forms, transformer architecture, wrappers delight, thousands of pieces of delicate glass created by a First Nations artist, Yhonnie Scarce, to tell significant stories, âpoorlyâ animated juggling, esoteric phenomena, works "in the style of", Folly Cove, sketchbook hoboes, the child in the foreground is shown at work, erasure in portraiture, obsessions, art colonies, Tolkien, Botticelli, celebrities, serious work attempting to convey a sentiment, Charlemagne, skull trumpet, game as argument, videogames might be art but can they be literature, a testament to the power of vision, determination, and the belief that African stories could shine on the global stage, to combine colors as in a painting, juxtapositions when you put his pieces side-by-side can be as strange as the items he's composing together in the individual pieces, rainbow rice seedlings depicting sleeping cats, whiteness (which he describes as the way we organize and are organized), twined cattail leaves, web vibrations to interpret worldly signals, no viewer should be aware that any art project was happening, Software Piracy Birthed an Underground Art Scene, one foot in reality and the other in fantasy, micro-details of things, sand drawings of Vanuatu follow principles from a branch of math, leaf art, an impresario of the experimental in a city, Art + Climate, chef, vaporous worlds, this lost copywriting art, MAiZE, âinfluencer artistâ, the radical story of Palestinian embroidery, artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if itâs scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways, itâs possible to believe in a happily ever after for us, most stylish older people donât follow rules, recipes knit our past with our present, hold on, a canvas for the art of living simply, craftivism, ornithological art, a time when children are living in peace, documentary, the most successful flop of all time, The "fuss" is that all of this AI art is built on the backs of people who remain uncompensated., somewhat gothic art direction, painting transmits rhythm, Ady Fidelin, the oldest known depiction of the bee in art is The man (or woman) of bicorp an (at least) 8000 year old cave painting in the Coves de l'Aranya, cozy game, stained glass sundials, Queer independent wrestling is where it is at, dematerializing, imaginary worlds and fantastical creatures, accessibility, Soteriologyâthat is the branch of theology that concerns itself with salvationâ, lunar codex, retired playground animals, wombat â that "most beautiful of God's creatures", Clone-a Lisa, Ismail al-Jazari, the "father of robotics", done with comics but never art or the revolution, MLB players develop their autographs, say gay, not doing their art was costing them timeâ, a world-class destination for art, but now weâre so much more, an incredibly ambitious title to pursue when many video games do not try to engage with having cultures or identities outside of the white/western represented, a sound collage, Uplifting neurodivergent joy and caregiving are important acts of resistance , Chief Hacking Officer, art exists everywhere, the new searchable (and playable!) web frontend, all sorts of angles on how games and fashion converge, one player will make it to The Center, art helps, strategic use of nonviolent disruptive tactics, âmoments of being,â âvigorous compressionâ, enjoying music, an archivist's dream...
a while until the end of the blues (400+ pages to go) yet i feel comfortable saying: art means many things to many people
Art as art (and inseparable from religion - especially before|outside Judaism, Islam and Christianity) is surely innate to being human - what of 40000 years of Australian deep-time culture? If this is the book's premise it sounds like an apologetics for nationalism.
Sebmojo that is my thought too.
posted by unearthed at 1:36 AM on June 16 [4 favorites]
Sebmojo that is my thought too.
posted by unearthed at 1:36 AM on June 16 [4 favorites]
sebmojo, thank you! yes, i'm doing okay. i also very much appreciate your thoughtfulness. i just love art. there was a question from SaltySalticid in the most recent thread i posted & i felt i hadn't fully addressed it. now i feel like i have (at least enough to where i still feel well within the bounds of feeling okay đ)
or, at least, i've started to address this...
unearthed, 40,000 years? the Makapansgat cobble is ~3 million years old [ResearchGate; pdf]
posted by HearHere at 1:59 AM on June 16
or, at least, i've started to address this...
unearthed, 40,000 years? the Makapansgat cobble is ~3 million years old [ResearchGate; pdf]
posted by HearHere at 1:59 AM on June 16
If this is the book's premise it sounds like an apologetics for nationalism.
Please take a closer look? That quote cut off on its own seems to suggest that, but from what I can tell, the premise is quite the opposite? (ie, the separation of "high" art and ornamentation or "craft" is artificial ... and they're all good art, Brent. I think.)
posted by taz at 2:03 AM on June 16 [8 favorites]
Please take a closer look? That quote cut off on its own seems to suggest that, but from what I can tell, the premise is quite the opposite? (ie, the separation of "high" art and ornamentation or "craft" is artificial ... and they're all good art, Brent. I think.)
posted by taz at 2:03 AM on June 16 [8 favorites]
Ha, I almost responded saying that addressing "what is art" could fill a whole FPP, and I wasn't going to make it. Thanks!
I'm generally happy with not having a strictly well-defined notion of 'art' on a day-to-day basis. I know it when I see it. I can talk about it and people generally know what I mean.
But it is a little annoying at times that things like craftsmanship or coding get pushed out of what should be a big tent in many peoples' conceptions of Art.
Similarly the term "creative" really bugs me when people use it to mean a person who does photography or whatever "Arty" thing. Like do they not realize the extreme creativity that goes into science or construction or medicine or engineering or lawyering and just about every other occupation, job, or hobby.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:08 AM on June 16 [6 favorites]
I'm generally happy with not having a strictly well-defined notion of 'art' on a day-to-day basis. I know it when I see it. I can talk about it and people generally know what I mean.
But it is a little annoying at times that things like craftsmanship or coding get pushed out of what should be a big tent in many peoples' conceptions of Art.
Similarly the term "creative" really bugs me when people use it to mean a person who does photography or whatever "Arty" thing. Like do they not realize the extreme creativity that goes into science or construction or medicine or engineering or lawyering and just about every other occupation, job, or hobby.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:08 AM on June 16 [6 favorites]
Sort of the other side of the argument, is deskilling in art. Renaissance artists were highly skilled painters, their skill at depicting people and places was amazing. Where lies the skill in abstract expressionism? For example⌠Technology has had an insane influence on art. Photography lessened the need for realism in painting. Why has craft been diminished? Many of the artists lauded today are not lauded for their craft, instead itâs for their marketing abilities. Many donât even make their art, as they have a factory to produce it, staffed with skilled people who get no credit. Thanks to technology (AI anyone), everybody is a photographer, a musician, a graphics designer, a writer, a filmmaker, etc. At least they like to believe thatâŚ
posted by njohnson23 at 9:13 AM on June 16 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 9:13 AM on June 16 [1 favorite]
Where lies the skill in abstract expressionism? For example⌠Technology has had an insane influence on art. Photography lessened the need for realism in painting. Why has craft been diminished?
previously
posted by HearHere at 9:45 AM on June 16
previously
posted by HearHere at 9:45 AM on June 16
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin. Interwar, so, predates basically everything Information Age, but still has some things to say.
posted by Alterscape at 1:20 PM on June 16 [1 favorite]
posted by Alterscape at 1:20 PM on June 16 [1 favorite]
Brian Eno: What is art for?
â⌠an attempt to answer the huge unanswered question, the dirty secret of the art world: what is art actually for?â
My own working definition of art is, "An artificial experience intended to change how you experience [things|the world|life]."
It's pretty much my criteria for deciding if something is "good art": Do I now experience the world differently?
The clichĂŠ that art is (about) self-expression (or for that matter, authenticity) is nonsense, too.
Personal experience will certainly inform what one does of course but in the end it is irrelevant to the value of the piece. Likewise, just because you've expressed yourself in some way doesn't in itself mean you've created a work of art.
YMMV.
posted by Ayn Marx at 3:55 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]
â⌠an attempt to answer the huge unanswered question, the dirty secret of the art world: what is art actually for?â
My own working definition of art is, "An artificial experience intended to change how you experience [things|the world|life]."
It's pretty much my criteria for deciding if something is "good art": Do I now experience the world differently?
The clichĂŠ that art is (about) self-expression (or for that matter, authenticity) is nonsense, too.
Personal experience will certainly inform what one does of course but in the end it is irrelevant to the value of the piece. Likewise, just because you've expressed yourself in some way doesn't in itself mean you've created a work of art.
YMMV.
posted by Ayn Marx at 3:55 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]
Alterscape, seeing Benjamin's essay reproduced in different ways at various times feels meta/ironic; yet always a joy.
Hannah Arendt's introduction, at the outset of the pdf you link, reminded me of their friendship. searching for something of this to share, i found Walter Benjamin's Last Work [LARB]. what was new to me in that article was knowledge of animosity between Arendt and Theodore Adorno. this helps me place the culture industry better [wiki]. thank you
what is art actually for?
Ayn Marx, i like Brian Eno's approach to this question, along with many other things he does, 10:40
âif youâre going to have a theory of art at all: itâs got to include everything from cake-decoration to Cezanne and include everything from billiard table design to Beethoven & any other set of alliterations you might like⌠art is everything you donât have to doâ
thank you
posted by HearHere at 7:55 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]
Hannah Arendt's introduction, at the outset of the pdf you link, reminded me of their friendship. searching for something of this to share, i found Walter Benjamin's Last Work [LARB]. what was new to me in that article was knowledge of animosity between Arendt and Theodore Adorno. this helps me place the culture industry better [wiki]. thank you
what is art actually for?
Ayn Marx, i like Brian Eno's approach to this question, along with many other things he does, 10:40
âif youâre going to have a theory of art at all: itâs got to include everything from cake-decoration to Cezanne and include everything from billiard table design to Beethoven & any other set of alliterations you might like⌠art is everything you donât have to doâ
thank you
posted by HearHere at 7:55 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]
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posted by Sebmojo at 1:31 AM on June 16 [7 favorites]