WhatIsArt

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I think art is fundamentally anything that stems from creativity and expression.

: "Art is feeling routed through form; and wisdom is emotional knowledge routed through reason." -- AdinaLevin, personal communication to SunirShah, in relation to how sense-making humans differ from animals; e.g. [The Symbolic Species]

Art, I reckon, is the label given to two different strands of the same subject.

The first aspect: Art is an aesthetic. It's about creating beauty. Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder and subject to social norms, art has a fundamentally social character. though obviously the relationship to society can be positive or negative (this idea is where shock art is born).

The second aspect: Art as a powerful communication from one person to another...you know the "it reaches out and touches me" (and not necessarily in a cuddly way) effect. Good art typically makes an effective communication, though the "message" received may vary depending on the viewer: one person sees a painting as an idyllic day of innocent joy on the beach, another person sees the painting as a comment on the vacuous nature of family life etc etc.

Once again, as with anything, there are those who spin off the idea of "art as communication" and create deliberately obscure works. When presented as art, the meaninglessness of the work makes a statement to the viewer... though this would tend to be tinged with one or more of the following: elitism, self referential irony, nihilism etc.

I disagree with the idea of "Art as product of creativity" as it ends up getting sucked down into the romanticisation of lunacy as genius. The elitist idea that only true, credible, individuality can produce art. Since every effect has a cause and nothing that happens is ahistorical then such genius/lunacy/individuality is a fabrication. anyone that existed as far from society as to be considered a true individual would probably not bother with anything recognisable as "art" and if they did would produce something that could not be appreciated by those still trapped inside. -- OceanHorgan

No art critic would ever claim that individuality is essential to create great art. Most art in the Western world only sought perfection in representation, not individual expression. A masterpiece could be the most perfect rendition of Madonna and Child, although most art served more mundane purposes such as porn or representations of wealth. It's only really in the 20th century that we have seen an emphasis on individuality, and since television, the necessity of the cult of personality in art. -- SunirShah

Since I have recently acquired an interest in poetry, synchronously with an interest in wiki, the idea of PoetryAndWiki has struck me (an expert on neither) as a very stimulating one. One of the basic takes on poetry is that it is a place to go to encounter other sensibilities. Indeed they may be 'masked': personae, a man can write a poem as a woman for example. On the other hand one can go to a wiki to encounter a group - and it is argued here at Meatball that an earnest approach symbolised by 'real names' adds to the encounter (I think that's the party line).

The individual aspect of poetry so described probably _is_ linked to Romantic ideas, so culturally and historically located. But so is the 'beauty' idea, in a related way reaching back to the eighteenth century roots in Europe. Reference to the PrincipleOfSufficientReason is another hobbyhorse of mine: suffice it to say that it is hardly just one principle (compare what Asimov does with it in the Foundation books to the implicit use by Tolkien, for example).

What strikes me most at present is the idea of WritingAgainstLoss, which is a common thought about poetry (deals with love, death, war) and encyclopedias (for example the Bourbaki group WikiPedia:NicholasBourbaki in mathematics writing against the 'hecatomb' of French mathematicians in World War I, in the years leading up to World War II). Poets probably deny that dealing with personal loss is their real domain; wiki writers say, 'please, not the encyclopedic', too. So art as popular repository (access, relevance, care and craft) is probably not it. But the adjacency makes one think why we do care, and where the distinctions lie further than the obvious slant that a museum differs from a forum. -- CharlesMatthews

Art can be define through many various practices. Artistic practices are based on the transdisciplinarity and are oriented by the research of connections between fields generally considered as distinct. Artistic practices create contexts.

 A context is : a space of interpretations, a space with its own rules.  
 These rules are themselves : interpretations sources, matter for new contexts.

--SylvieBourguet

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- [Art Server Wikis]

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