What Exactly is Art? ©
Posted: Sunday, February 27, 2011
by Arlene Wright-Correll
http://www.learn-america.com
This week’s email question asks, “What exactly is art and what exactly is an artist?”
Boys, this is a tough question and I will answer this question pertaining to the visual 2-D and 3-D arts simply because that is the world in which I live. However, art lacks a truly satisfactory definition. I believe it is one’s use of skill and imagination in the way something is done whether is be in painting, music or simply doing your job so well in whatever field, that you have made it into an art form.
It wasn’t until the 15th and 16th centuries in Italythat the idea of an object being considered as a “work of art” emerges and it emerged as a collective term during the Renaissance while encompassing architecture, sculpture and painting, specifically by the Italian artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari. As the world grew music and poetry was added in the 18th century and the whole group, poetry, music, architecture, sculpture and painting became to be labeled as the “Fine Arts”.
Then, as today, other art forms such as decorative arts and crafts, including but not limited to, pottery, weaving, furniture making, wood carving, and metalworking are still excluded from the “Fine Arts” category. Thus we have to wonder how art became distinguished from the decorative arts and crafts and how and why do we distinguish an artist from a craftsperson? In ancient times and even the middle ages, the word art, was not applied to the human activities that included painting, sculpturing, weaving and shoemaking. They were simply defined as crafts and the creators in these fields were defined as craftsman.
A more exalted perception of art arose during the Renaissance, in Italy, thus the creator gained a social status as an “artist” and the painter and sculptor’s activities were defined as to be subject to the same inspiration as those of a musician and poet. The academies of art, as they grew, flourished gaining popularity in Italyand then in Franceand then later elsewhere. These academies started to teach and educate artists through various courses of instruction which included such subjects as anatomy and geometry and their students were known to later become “artists”. These academies fulfilled the structure of the term “Fine Arts” which today is considered to be a narrow definition of what is constituted as art.
As these academies grew and time went on into the 19th century, new claims were made about the nature of painting and sculpture and by the middle of the 19th century modern artists rejected or contradicted the principles and standards of these academies and the Renaissance tradition. Artists began to experiment and formulation their own notions and truths of paint pigments and canvas as a two-dimensional surface and started creating “Art for Art’s Sake”.
Moving into the early 20th century we learn that many traditional notions as to the identity of art and the artist were thrown out the window by the French artist Marcel Duchamp his Dada colleagues who declared that anything an artist produces is art. (Dada is western European literary and artistic movement (1916-23) that sought the discovery of authentic reality through the abolition of traditional discovery of authentic reality through the abolition of traditional culture and aesthetic forms.) For the duration of the 20th century it became complicated as to how art and artist is perceived while at the same time we have grown a broader and more inclusive assessment of art and the artist.
With all this said I simply leave it to you to decide what art is and who is an artist. For to me art is a challenge, an experiment, an expression and inspiration and I consider myself a painter who indulges in all these categories with various types of paint and sometimes glass to create whatever creative energy is flowing on any given day.
May the Creative Force be with you!
Arlene Wright-Correll
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