Tuesday, October 21, 2008
What is (not) Art?
Venus of Willendorf (25-20 ka BCE), Mona Lisa - Leonardo Da Vinci (1503-05), David - Michelangelo (1501-04): This is NOT art.
Fountain - Marcel Duchamp (1917), L.H.O.O.Q. - Marcel Duchamp (1919), "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?"- Guerilla Girls (1989): This IS art.
I recently got into an argument about art with a friend. He was trying to convince me that elephants and chimpanzees can make art by showing me videos of animals painting. I was trying to make his head explode with my vision. In the end, I was not convinced, and alas, his head was still intact.
This argument did; however, make me think back to my art lectures and how I learned what art is and what it is not. Believing is Seeing by Mary Anne Staniszewski one the books I had read on this theme. It is great in the sense that it challenges ideas about art and it points to the fact that questioning art is looking at it as something that has a specific place in history and culture. Art, as we all recognize and know it, is a recent concept born in the modern era (roughly the past 200 years).
"It is we who have given the name 'art' to religious things; the word itself doesn't exist among 'primitives'. We have created it in thinking about ourselves, about our satisfaction. We created it for our sole and unique use." - Marcel Duchamp
The first three pictures in my post would most often be described at portraying art. This is taking them out of their historical context and embedding them in our culture and our relatively new concept: art. Before Mo(dernism) - around the late 19th C - what we most often call art were instruments or religious, political, and patronage control. However beautiful they are, these works were specifically designed, under patronage, with either political or religious purpose and the "artist" was nothing more than a skilled man.
Art is connected to intent and reason. It is created by an independent artist with absolute power over it. Art is not something that is commanded by a patron but it is made out of the artist's free will and vision, which is not dictated by an external political or religious agenda. Calling the first three pictures as portrayals of art is taking them out of their context.
Following this logic; there is little Fascist/Communist actual art, since under both regimes artists were both persecuted and forced to work for political agendas.
Also following this logic; neither chimps nor elephants can make art.
# posted by Corina @ 12:09 AM 
