Posts by giovanni tiso
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And please, do not insult me by quoting Gombrich's Story of Art at me; I am a professional in this business.
Not allowed to quote an art historian who reckons that the definition of Art you're wedded to is unhelpful. Gotcha.
But you claim this use of the word art is merely of "some use for art dealers, art historians and museum curators, " which is a bit like saying the word "car" is of some use to mechanics, traffic engineers and motoring journalists.
My point is that it doesn't have universal value even amongst those people (not even art dealers, although for sure your idea of art is the most useful to them). Otherwise it would be hard to fathom why art collections worldwide include works of no aesthetic value whatsoever or whose value is not exclusively aesthetic.
Plus - and this to my mind is very revealing of your approach to this discussion - you appear not to have noticed that I left out "artists" from that list.
It looks to me that you are ascribing a set of modern Western values to people not of the West and not of the modern age, then accusing me of being the cultural imperialist.
Sigh.
Your last slice of copypasta alla Gombrich does more for my view than yours. Your point - which amounts to the claim that "art" is but one meaning of the word "art" - is meaningless, since it is the one meaning we are discussing.
We're not discussing it, actually. You're saying that it's what it is, and have graciously given us the freedom to agree with you.
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art is a comparatively recent invention, one of the Enlightenment.
Once again: this is simply not true. The English word art comes from the Latin, that alone ought to tell you that it pre-existed the Quattrocento, let alone the Enlightenment. In the Italian Renaissance, which is itself an invention of nineteenth century historians, it supposedly acquired a different, narrower meaning, and a powerful one to be sure, capable of maintaining some currency even now, and in cultures and places other than the one in which it originated. But it's one meaning, and a meaning that twentieth century artists have been criticising at times ferociously. While it has some use for art dealers, art historians and museum curators, it is most certainly not universal, far from it. And your point that it somehow overwrites every other meaning of the word art, in all its inflections, is ludicrous.
In the Polynesian islands, for example, the notion of art as an activity separate from the making of useful things was quite unknown until contact with the West, yet now there are artists of Polynesian countries whose practices are those of the Art World
What you are describing here is the introduction of market relations in Polynesian cultures. It does not make the art that Polynesian people produced before their contact with the west any less of an art, of any less meaningful to the people who produced it at the time when they produced it. Just as Phidias was held by his contemporaries in the same regard as Michelangelo or Picasso were in their times.
Here's E.H. Gombrich, on page 1 of The Story of Art.
There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. Once these were men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave; today some buy their paints, and design posters for the hoardings; they did and do many other things. There is no harm in calling all these activities art as long as we keep in mind that such a word may mean very different things in different times and places, and as long as we realise that Art with a capital A has no existence. For Art with a capital A has come to be something of a bogey and a fetish. You may crush an artist by telling him that what he has just done may be quite good in its own way, only it is not 'Art'. And you may confound anyone enjoying a picture by declaring that what he liked in it was not the Art but something different.
Elsewhere he elaborated on that a little bit.
One of the rhetorical functions of this opening arises out of the wish to reassure any reader who might feel intimidated by big abstract nouns, what I call "art with a capital A." But this opening also implies the theoretical position that underlies the whole book. Briefly, I propose to go.back to earlier usage, to the time when the word "Art "signified any skill or mastery, as it still does when we speak of the "Art of War," or the "Art of Love," or as Whistler did "The gentle art of making enemies." This good old usage was replaced in the Romantic Period by the one that is still in current use according to which the word "Art" stands for a special faculty of a human mind to be classified with religion and science. It is an interesting shift in meaning but it cannot concern me here. Suffice it to say that when you replace the word 'Art' by the word 'Skill' in the opening sentence, it ceases to look challenging or paradoxical: There can be no skill in the abstract, skill is always for something and the skill with which this book is concerned is mainly that of image making.
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Are you suggesting that contemporary artistic movements, in the West or elsewhere, produce works of largely aesthetic value? (Besides the obvious fact that neither did Giotto, Leonardo and Michelangelo. Their works did have intellectual, moral, religious and dare I say it even practical value.)
Once again, you are using a partial and largely idealised, abstracted idea of art that arose out of a particular sociocultural context and applying it to the rest of the world throughout time. It's never going to work.
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merc
Just quietly. Oh!
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Not to mention the fact that when Boardman wrote that the Greeks had no separate words for art and crafts, he didn't mean that the Greeks had no meaningful concept of art or regard for artists. Since all we know about Phidias and Praxiteles - in the absence of their actual works - is the spectacularly high regard in which they were held by their contemporaries, such a statement would have been - how shall I put it? - stupid.
What the absence of those clear linguistic and conceptual demarcations means, rather, as indeed it has been the case in most cultures, is that the Greeks conceptualised art and craft as existing on the same spectrum. I'd argue that it's more a case of the monolithic west coming around again to this idea than the reverse.
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I've been surprised how many people have been prepared to dismiss him as the undeserving bad seed
That. Plus, concerning something that Islander wrote further up
there are plenty of young people who are in vile environments and DONT take part in a robbery that led to a young man's death.
I think it's the same mindset that we apply all too often across the board. We all know people who grew up in violent, uncaring environments and yet became very caring adults, just as we all know people who overcame very challenging disabilities to achieve great things. But should we expect this of everyone? And so long as we advocate for equality of opportunity and inclusion, why limit this advocacy to one category - the physically or intellectually disabled - and not another - those who are disabled by the environment in which they grew up?
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The Wire, you say? Sounds interesting.
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I think we blew our quota with John Clarke.
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That we can.
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I respect your stake in this, but unless you think there are unlimited media resources then frankly, yes, there is competition for attention.
In that case I'd have to say that their needs are more pressing and their cause more urgent, as it goes far closer to the core of what we mean by a just society. If we could change that, other things would fall into line, including the sometime unfair treatment of the disabled community.