During the Spring semester of my freshman year of college, I took a visual arts course. Prior to taking the course, I had very limited exposure to fine art, never once taking an art class - well except for culinary arts in high school. Nevertheless, I had mixed feelings of trepidation that this would be a struggle for me to get through and curiosity at a topic that I had not put much thought into. The course consisted of a mixture of lectures and class meetings at art museums in Uptown Charlotte. Among the museums that we visited were the McColl Center, the Mint Museum, the Gantt Center and, my "favorite," the Bechtler Museum.
As the course progressed, I gradually developed an appreciation for the arts, noticing the artists' motivations behind each piece and taking in the aesthetics of these works of art. Everything was fine and dandy until we reached the Bechtler. Modern art has been and continues to be a mystery to me. I understand that artists are always looking for new ways of visually expressing their emotions - and I admit that some of these new expressions are actually personally aesthetically pleasing and meaningful - but when do these works cross the line between a work of art and something that doesn't belong among the great works of art.
This had me thinking of how we consider something to be a work of art. Is it something binary, as in it contains a set of criteria that must be met in order for that particular piece to be considered art? Or is it more subjective and can be viewed differently from person to person. Perhaps in my case, art is in the eyes of the beholder similar to how Mary Douglas defines dirt. In "Classifications and the Philosophical Understanding of Art," Ruth Lorand explains different philosophies behind the classification methods of art and what can be considered art. A major point to take away from this reading is that the concept of art is not binary. We do not simply look at a statue, painting, poem, or novel and decide whether it is art or not. Instead, we would state, "Oh that was a beautiful work by Picasso," or, "This poem is awful!" Art is described based on a qualitative analysis, which means that although I might dislike the modern paintings that depict random colors on a canvas, I still see it as a work of art, although an awful one at that.
Your conclusion is fully warranted, as there's no one rubric for scoring things as "art" or "not art." I like the way you set the boundary not on subjective description (however important that might be) but on qualitative analysis beyond our dislikes and likes. When my son played the piano with his nose a few nights ago (he thought if he could play by ear he could surely play by nose, and he was right), it was not exactly a concert-going experience. But it was accurate and silly and surely an expression of his interest in mixing things up, as many artists do. So I do see what you're saying.
ReplyDeleteBut here's a challenge: there are several performance artists who do "interesting" things with their bodies. One example: in the 1970s, I think, Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm in front of 10 spectators in an art gallery. A woman (I'm so sad I missed this, as we were nearby at the time) in Germany recently "hatched" eggs from a height to "paint" a canvas. You can imagine where the hatching was from. A few guys licked other people's sneaker soles in Paris. Or just look up Marina Abramovic. Art? Not art? Sport? Mental illness? So many possible categories . . .