January 17, 2025

Art

The definition of art seems to confound many people, too many are in the art world itself.

Here's my definition in two aspects:

  • Art is imagination, concretized.
  • The definition of art derives from the root meaning: arə- Proto-Indo-European and Greek ar- "to fit together." Fabrication lies at the heart of the meaning, but within lies a crucial aspect that exceeds mere assembly. Popular usage indicates a scope that is transcendental, indicative of the superlative. The art of war, the art of cooking, the art of reasoning, the art of... What I take from this is something about the moment when one is operating at and beyond the frontier of all extant known methods of "fabrication" (bracketed to indicate an expansive definition of the term). This is the territory where one resorts to inspiration, imagination, what was known to be the muse, the world shared with faith, the land (noumena?) into which our rational mind pushes into, balls cupped into the hands*.
  • *The spanish expression is ¡Manda cojones!, which translates to "It's fucking awesome!" I've used it time and again both in Spain and in the States, usually resorting to what is probably my own peculiar transliteration, "huevos en mis manos." I've never thought I was misunderstood. When I've deployed the phrase, my meaning is a combination of trepidation and commitment, that I'm operating into unknown territory, that the stakes are high.


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    PostScript:

    (I imagine this to be the sticky spot for a never ending list of related subject matter. A magpie's nest.)

    - I've found Carter Ratcliff to be a delightful writer. His Substack emailer is welcome in my inbox. Here he is on the definition of art:
    We ask "What is art?" not to settle the question but to force ourselves up against the impossibility of settling it--an impossibility worth noting, as explicitly as we can, for it is what keeps art open and present and therefore alive.

    - Thierry de Duve, THE INVENTION OF NON-ART: A HISTORY:

    I DON'T KNOW WHO COINED THE EXPRESSION "NON-ART." But I remember that "non-art" and its supposed twin, "anti-art," were very much in fashion in the art criticism of the 1960s. The terms were used to refer to Dada and early Pop art, then seen as "Neo-Dada." However, by the mid-'70s, critics had realized that Pop art owed very little to the nihilistic thrust of the Dadaists. To imagine Robert Rauschenberg shouting with Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich had become counterintuitive; attention had shifted from Dada to the Neo in Neo-Dada, from the revolution to its recuperation. Consequently, "non-art" and "anti-art" fell out of fashion. It was clear to everyone in the art world that the aggressiveness of anti-art had been tamed, that the negativity of non-art had been in turn negated, sublated, or otherwise mutated into positivity.
    Not everyone greeted the erasure of non-art's negativity with indifference or resignation.

    - The aesthetic judgment "This is art" in Stanley Cavell and Thierry de Duve by Pioter Shmugliakov & Alma Itzhaky:
    Before the rise of the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, the principal question vis-à-vis an artwork was the evaluative one: "Is it a good work of art?" or, in a manner in which it was most commonly posed, "Is this piece of art beautiful?" The fact that this is art that is being judged, on the other hand, was trivially given--neither argued for, nor disputed. The classification of certain objects as works of art, if it gave pause for philosophical queries at all, was considered an empirical question, preliminary to the aesthetic appreciation of such works. In the 20th century, however, the cultural situation in the arts became increasingly defined by the fact that the very belonging of certain objects to the category of art turned to be a matter of controversy. Confusion and dismay became the stereotypical responses of art spectators faced with certain objects that claimed to be art, and were treated as art by certain people and institutions, but which by the traditional standards shared by most of the population appeared as no more than a hoax or a provocation (viz. Malevich's Black Square [1915], Duchamp's Fountain [1917/1963], Manzoni's Artist's Shit [1961]). Since the 1960s, clarifying the status of these objects also became a central issue for philosophical aesthetics.

    - X

    Posted by Dennis at January 17, 2025 10:02 AM

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