But is it art? — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	Oh crap... I wasn't expecting this kind of response. I only just checked back here today. Dufty: I really like that definition. Anyways, DL was right, I'm not saying that art has to have a clear cut start or end, nor am I ruling out experimentation in any of its forms, but I don?t believe experimentation on its own is enough. Throwing cans of paint on a canvas is quite often done with intent beyond a simple desire to throw cans of pain on canvas (although I must admit that thought alone is quite desirable). The process, be it experimental or otherwise, it part of the art and these is usually a reason for an artist to create an artwork in a particular way. Simon says: (sorry, couldn?t help myself) [quote] What if I regarded my Photoshop image as a draft, and actually painted this picture. Would it be art then? Or will it never be art if I can't say "why" I made it, other than "it looks nice"?[/quote] Nup, never. Sorry dude, but the medium makes very little difference (and that debate is another chapter in and of itself). If you painted an image of a pot plant and it was extremely photorealistic, I?d not call it art either. I?d say you were an amazing painter and they you have a very refined skill, but not an artist. You?d have done nothing but copy, which is for no other reason than beauty. Cause quite frankly, a photography could have done the exact same thing with much less time and effort. Time, effort and skill don?t mark art. Art is all about the reason. At least, that?s how I see it. NB: I don?t want to start a debate about ?photography as art?, I do see photography as an art from, but I thin the same issues apply, intent beyond beauty and all that jazz. Additionally, if an artist is deliberating over weather a piece of their work is finished then it is usually a good sign that they are unsure that the resultant artwork sufficiently expressed their intent. They obviously have an idea as to what they what the work to do. Suho, you're right, aesthetics can be seen as a purpose but personally, I don't think that's enough. Maybe I should use the word "cool" instead of beautiful. In any event, beauty is seldom the only reason for creating an image, and if it is the only reason, then at least for me, that wouldn't cut it. I?d argue that beauty is a horribly subjective term as it is and it's more of an intrinsic aspiration than an intent. After all, we all want to be beautiful, we want life to be beautiful. To some that's a living on a white sandy beach with crystal clear waters, to others it's a Smokey blues bar and a bottle of whiskey, to me it?s a a good book, a pack of smokes and a vanilla latte. However, at the risk of contradicting myself, if an artist can encapsulate our intrinsic aspiration of beauty simply by creating a beautiful image then that can be art. But even this has intent beyond that simple desire, it's about the human nature of the desire for bueaty. Anyways, to try and clarify some things, I'll rant on about a friend of mine I used to live with. He's an artist who's now quite self sufficient from selling his paintings, anyways, for a long time there he would collect bus and train tickets (in Australia the bus/train tickets are heat reactive card/paper, so the vending machines don?t need ink, just a hot pin to print with) and he would wonder around the city finding sources of heat and press the cards up against it to create a random image. He did this a lot and at one point have several thousand tickets with bizarre images on them, he'd then scan them into a computer at really high resolution, crop out interesting parts he found (faces, trees, symbols etc...), and then paint the printed cropped scan of the ticket on massive canvases (like 3m high kinda massive). There's a lot of experimentation in those processes, but there was extremely clear purpose and intent. Sometimes he just made a collage of the tickets, other times he exhibited large prints of the scans, other times he used digital photographs or random city scapes and processed them in PS to look similar to the ticket images. Once he even made a rubber mould of an Aztec calendar then made a giant toffee out of it -- not really sure what hat one was about though -- but it was all part of an ongoing process in his search for the sublime and in his own way, a search for god in some sense or another. ? I don?t explain it nearly as well as he does. Suffice to say, the images and paintings he's created over the past years (actually, his most recent habits have him photographing steam and taking micro photos of televisions and weird stuff like that) have been incredibly abstract yet strikingly powerful and kinda eerie at the same time. Now, if you ask him why he painted a 3m x 2m canvas with something akin at a clouds filter with a few brightly burnt out spots and some subtle colour play, he could talk your ear off about it for weeks. That is what I see as art. The final image is only but a tiny glimpse of the work behind it, and if the artist is good enough, you should be able to see and read parts of what he was trying to do in the image (i.e., see god or something). But that's just one kind of art and not all forms of art show such clear separation from "craft" alone, but these is a separation in there somewhere, and that's probably the hardest part to define. Where is the art and where is the craft? It's likely 90% of the time there is some true artistic intent within making any image, but if such elements were quantifiable, and we could measure them, I'd probably say that the art element should out weigh the craft for it to be considered art. Yet we can't measure that so it's difficult if not impossible to make a judgment here, at list from an outside perspective, which is why I like to place the onus of that measure on the artist. Obviously the definition can?t be clean cut and there are a lot of very blurred lines between art, design and craft, but I think there are some measures by which you can asses such things. In any event, the comment shii threw in fits quite nicely indeed, "Art happens in the head". Loading...
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