Ten Noteworthy Events

List 10 noteworthy (to you, anyway) events in the last 48 hours. Use these as a starting point for an entry in your ME book.

Trash? ~ or ~ Art?

Is the plastic bag below Trash or Art?

The artist Joshua Allen Harris uses plastic bags as an art medium that intrigues his viewers. See them in action in the video below... 

 More about the artist, Joshua Allen Harris.  

What do you think about his work?
Leave me a comment with your opinion & thoughts. Make sure to leave your name and hour...

What is Art?

The questions "What is Art?" and "What is an Artist?" today are not easily answered. According to William Rubin, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "there is no single definition of art." The art historian Thomas McEvilley agrees that today "more or less anything can be designated as art." Arthur Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University and art critic of The Nation, believes that today "you can't say something's art or not art anymore. That (discussion is) all finished."

However, what has finished is not the creation of artworks, but a certain way of talking about art. Artists, whoever they are, continue to produce, but we, non-artists, are no longer able to say whether it is art or not. But at the same time, we aren't comfortable with dismissing it as art because it fails to fit what we think art should be (whatever that is).  We struggle with this because we have been taught that art is important and we're unwilling to face up to the recently revealed insight that art in fact has no "essence." When all is said and done, "art" remains significant to human beings. In some cases it seems natural that anything can be art and elicit an art like response. On the other hand, the idea that now anything can be art, and that no form of art is truer than any other, can also strike us as unacceptable.

The chewing gum displayed in this post, Is it art?

Or is the work below by Maurizio Savini, created from chewing gum, a better example of what art is?

What do you think?

Leave a comment with your opinion. Make sure you leave your name and hour to get credit.

Where do You see Art?

ART has not always been what we think it is today. An object regarded as Art today may not have been perceived as such when it was first made, nor was the person who made it necessarily regarded as an artist. Both the notion of "art" and the idea of the "artist" are relatively modern terms.

Many of the objects we identify as art today -- cave paintings, Greek painted pottery, medieval manuscript illuminations, and so on -- were made in times and places when people had no concept of "art" as we understand the term. These objects may have been appreciated in various ways and often admired, but not as "art" in the current sense.

Where do YOU see art today? What role does it play in your world?

Post a comment to this message with your thoughts for some extra credit. Make sure you leave your name and hour.