Posts by Rob Stowell
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Defining art is simple:
Art is the worship of error.
Heh. I thought that was religion :)
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...art is a comparatively recent invention, one of the Enlightenment....
sounds awfully like "... gravity is a comparatively recent invention, one of the Enlightenment." Cos before Newton, things just drifted about...
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Great posts. Thanks.
I was constantly being sent multiple copies of letters with contradictory messages
Still get this- and some of the 'feeling like a criminal'- just in relation to an after-school-programme subsidy. But have also dealt with good, friendly helpful people at WINZ, too.
And another vote for not getting too antsy-pantsy about some people living long-term on the dole. A small proportion of us choosing to live on barely subsistance $ - thus staying a little outside the mass of society- can be a good thing.
Offers a different perspective. Allows time for productivity that's not counted in GDP- of thoughts, arts, crafts, gardening, families and community work.
Wouldn't downplay the risks of inter-generational dependency and the way poverty can eat away self-esteem and general well-being. People who want paid work should be helped to find it.
But if there's a small number of people who can 'live the(ir) dream' on a pittance, I don't mind subsiding them for a while. It's not like they're costing the country big-time- unlike these hoons. -
Aesthetics encompass utility: there is no exclusion.
Indeed- in so many ways. The notion that art is 'useless' - which sprang from the same 'art-for-art's-sake' romantic movement- is another nonsense artists didn't have to deal with before that time.
That whole romantic ideal of the artist as a maverick genius can also be seen as a grand (and cunning) manoeuvre to capture maximum status :) -
@Paul
But, since we have both signed up to the Institutional Theory (however differently we interpret it) we should look at the practice of the institutions; and there we find that the distinction between art and craft is made. Art galleries exhibit art and crafts are often displayed in specialist museums.
I'm not saying there's no difference between archetypical cases of art and craft - just that there's no clear boundary.
I think we interpret the role of institutions differently too- but just a quick search of, eg the Te Papa site looking for "Mäori Art" comes up with a fair swag of entries.
One of them relates to the Te Mäori exhibition- which is said to have been ground-breaking in exhibiting the taonga explicitly as art, rather than 'artifacts'.
This seems to me a positive move. In fact, wouldn't the very notion of "primitive art" be an oxymoron in your interpretation of the definition? You may not- but I think this a problem for your interpretation :)
Trying not to go into too much detail:
1. Dickie's theory seems able to deal with the notion of multiple 'artworlds'. (Dickie discusses this possibility- can't find a reference, but referenced here: Dickie "...accepts that his definition is indexical, in that the Artworld is a cultural practice that must be understood within the context of its own time and place. But he also accepts that cultures other than our own might have thier own Artworlds (and, within them, create their own artworks)."2. As Davies notes, what look awfully like (not to beg the question) artistic/aesthetic practices are more-or-less universal in homo sapien cultures. It seems more than churlish- it seems just obtuse- to deny these practices and practitioners are artistic.
Some at least (cf China, Japan and India)- if not most- of these practices are self-conciously concerned with notions we'd have trouble not calling aesthetic.
(It might be worth getting away from the word 'art' and its etymology- and talk of 'the arts'. Music and poetry- and (perhaps a little more controversially for some of us :) story-telling and dance- are generally included in accounts of art. The practices around, say, a poem becoming a 'candidate for appreciation' are less obviously involved with formal institutions- and may be an easier paradigm to consider.)
3. Davies notes it is odd to say that (his example) a Shakespeare play or a Bach fugue were not works of art when they were created- but became so at a later date. (I know Paul, you wish to push the 'origins of "true" art to the Renaissance. But the same objections will apply to other works).
The reasoning behind doing so seems to be an attempt to locate in one single time and place (18thC Europe) the beginnings of 'art-for-art's-sake': the first 'objects created primarily for aethetic purposes'.
I think this very unhelpful to the theory. It fails to explain how similar impulses (to create fine, beautiful, striking things) occur in all cultures; and trying to put "Aesthetics" outside other socio-economic-cultural considerations leads into odd territory, and flies in the face of the facts (art and status, for example, are very often closely entwined).
4. Since the institutional theory seems able to deal with multiple artworlds, and it seems prima facie that we live in a world with a rich and varied range of artistic traditions- it is obtuse to deliberately exclude all non-western aesthetic traditions by definition .
If the institutional theory cannot account for the planet's many and varied traditions of music, poetry, storytelling, dance- as well as the visual traditions that "look a heck of a lot like and are readily identified as art by those from a different cultural background" - so much the worse for the theory.
There may be good reasons the 'institutional theory' can't do this- but I don't think you've offered any :)
(Sorry for the length of this ramble. Back to being dismayed and furious at Rhino Hide and Poorer Bennet. :( -
Assuming art is definable: Dickie's institutional theory is quite the worst- apart from all the others :)
So I'd sign up. But your interpretation of that theory seems a fair way from Dickie's- and even further from those of, eg, Novitz (or Davies- though it doesn't look like he is exactly in the institutional camp).
Since David Novitz (lovely teacher and sharp thinker, too) was my introduction to the topic- long time ago- it's perhaps unsurprising my understanding of Dickie is skewed his way.
At any rate: any definition that attempts to draw a clear line between art and craft; between objects with aesthetic qualities produced for utilitarian ends and objects produced purely for aesthetic ends- totally divorced from utility or economic and social life- is not just doomed; it's wrong-headed. As well as failing to describe most of what 'ordinary language' calls art, it's mistaken about the capital A art it posits as the paradigm.
Because (I'd say) most of such 'fine art' is also useful, and its production is usually deeply entwined in the social and economic.
The decorative qualities of much of what you'd call craft are often not in any straight-forward way useful- sometimes it would seem quite the contrary. Often the decorative elements would have taken up a great deal more time than the production of un-ornamented objects. They were adorned for what seem fairly clearly aesthetic reasons. We know what I would call the artistic skills of their makers were highly valued. It seems relatively straightforward to call such objects art. (Davies says most of this rather better.) -
Artists are identified by the Art World by the fact of their making expressive pieces of work, and the purpose of those works being expression.
Ah, the ol' 'art as expression' theory (as mediated by the masters of the artworld).
I thought that died with Tolstoy? -
Not coy, Paul. Busy!
And since you don't respond to what criticism I've made (that your definition is prescriptive, covertly qualitative, and fails to describe typical usage) I'm not going to set out to retype or paraphrase and condense the considerable arguments of Davies- or Novitz- at least until I get half-an-hour free! -
Paul, you haven't even started countering Davies' arguments. (Hint: anthropology probably isn't where the crux of the question lies.) Perhaps you could take it up over lunch some day?
But you also seem to be mixing up definitional and qualitative questions.Mayor Prendergast (who has high stakes in this game) is trying to force this monstrosity upon us on the grounds that it is art. ....
Perhaps we should be asking more questions about what constitutes art. Our visual environment would be the winner on the day.There's an assumption (perhaps unfortunately implied in the notion of the 'status' of art being conferred on an object) that something 'being art' also means being ' worthy of appreciation'.
The 'institutional theory' (and I'm using quotes cos you and I seeem to understand it in rather contrary ways) was explicitly intended- at least as usually formulated- as a definition that would include the good, the bad, and the indifferent. It has to, or it fails in its intention to be a descriptive definition.
It also fails as a descriptive definition (and becomes a partial or prescriptive one) if it excludes a large part of what most speakers would term art.
Running the two things together, you seem to be advocating a prescriptive Western 'Fine Arts' definition- which you are absolutely entitled to do. What isn't so plausible is your claim that this is the established view of (heh heh!) the 'academic aesthetics industry' :) -
the objects made were not intended as art in the way we understand that term
I think you mean in the way you understand that term.
As in 'high Art' in the art-for-art's-sake tradition of romantic genius and art-museum-curator?
I've never encountered a theory quite that limited before :) Davies really does cover this territory (I can't be arsed typing out relevant quotes- google books ain't text...) in (third time I've linked to it!)
Non-western art and art's definition Most of what he says isn't especially controversial.
Though maybe you'd disagree, Paul?