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.

Welcome!!

School starts August 11th for all students and I am so looking forward to seeing you!

I like to post interesting art-related things on our blog, like art headlines, fascinating things I've found or heard about or just what artsy stuff I'm thinking about.

Here is an article I just read about an architect who recreates famous buildings in Legos! Check it out and let me know what you think...Have you ever built anything large scale in legos before?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/23/AR2010072302244_2.html

Be sure you check out the photos too! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/07/23/GA2010072302146.html

FLASH! 11 Warhol Portraits STOLEN!

Warhol Paintings Stolen in Los Angeles

Excerpts from the New York Times article By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
Published: September 11, 2009

A multimillion-dollar collection of artwork by Andy Warhol was stolen from the home of a wealthy art collector in West Los Angeles last week, Los Angeles police said Friday.

The valuable collection included 10 silk-screen paintings of famous sports figures. According to investigators, the artwork was on display in the dining room of Richard Weisman, a businessman and art connoisseur whose well-known collection was featured in a book he published in 2003, “Picasso to Pop: The Richard Weisman Collection.”

The paintings are about 40 inches by 40 inches each, and were created between 1977 and 1979.

Find out more about the theft by Google-ing "Eleven Warhol Portraits Stolen" or you can read more here:
http://blogs.laweekly.com/ladaily/arts-news/11-warhol-portraits-stolen/

First person to tell Ms. Ridlen which 11 portraits were stolen, gets a prize!

"In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes."

After studying Warhol and his use of celebrity in Pop Art, I thought it would be interesting to view a website that talks about his use of color.

Andy Warhol did not use local color, or realistic color in his portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Instead he used arbitrary, or non-representational colors, that depicted aspects of popular culture that he felt Marilyn Monroe was a part of. He also experimented with colors that would affect the viewer's mood. Color has a powerful impact on how we respond to an image.

Go to the website below and experiment with the colors on the Marilyn image.

Then scroll down and listen to Andy Warhol discuss his use of color in the 1981 interview. You can also read more about Warhol and his use of another printmaking method, screenprinting.

http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/marilyns.html

How does the color affect the mood of the Marilyn portrait? Does it change the way you feel about the art work?

Ms. Ridlen asked you to think about how colors and shapes can represent your identity. What expressive mood will you create with your color scheme choices? What do you want the colors to say about you to the viewer?

To earn additional points, create a drawing of an object from pop culture that you think has characteristics in common with your personality. Use arbitrary color to add symbolism and depth to the interpretation of your artwork. On the back, tell how the colors you chose represent a mood or feeling or how they enforce the personality traits you were trying to show. Make sure you put your name on it.

No.59 - L.H.O.O.Q., Marcel Duchamp (1919)

From The Guardian Portrait of the Week Series...A good image to continue our conversation about WHEN IS SOMETHING ART?

Who does art belong to? Is what Duchamp did plagiarism? Is it Art or destruction? (his image was created by defacing a postcard, not the real Mona Lisa...)

Jonathan Jones
The Guardian, Saturday 26 May 2001

Artist: Marcel Duchamp (1887- 1968), whose sense of humour first came to attention in 1917, when he submitted, under the name R Mutt, a urinal to a New York art exhibition. Duchamp anonymously defended R Mutt in a magazine, and gave a definition of his new art of the readymade: whether or not Mr Mutt made it with his own hand has no importance. He chose it. He took an everyday article, placed it so that its usual significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - and created a new thought for that object.

Subject: The Mona Lisa, painted in the 16th century by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and the most celebrated portrait in the world.

Distinguishing features: The Mona Lisa's deep-set eyes and round face do not conflict with Duchamp's act of violence. The beard and moustache seem a completion. Duchamp said the Mona Lisa becomes a man - not a woman disguised as a man, but a real man. This hints at a different meaning from vandalism, for all the crudeness of those letters, L.H.O.O.Q., which sound out the French sentence: "She has a hot bum." This is not simply an attack on the mass-produced tourist icon the Mona Lisa had become, but rather an interpretation of it. Duchamp's Mona Lisa is a Freudian joke. Duchamp reveals, in a simple gesture, that which the painting conceals. But this is not merely an allusion to Freud. Duchamp uncovers an ambiguity of gender at the heart of Leonardo's aesthetic - that Leonardo sees the male form in the female.
This kind of hidden self-portrait is what Duchamp discovers in his rectified readymade. His Dadaist intervention redeems Leonardo's masterpiece from the banality of reproduction and returns it to the private world of creation.

Inspirations and influences: Andy Warhol also did several versions of the Mona Lisa.

Where is it? A version can be seen at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8008).