Posts by Paul Litterick
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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.
It has worked for the last two hundred years. That is Shiner's point: art is a comparatively recent invention, one of the Enlightenment. I am not applying art to the rest of the world throughout time; that is your endeavour. I am saying that art is an invention of the monolithic West that has become global. 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: they work professionally, producing works of primarily aesthetic value, sell through dealers and are members of networks.
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Dickie's 'Institutional theory' does not tend generally towards the sort of interpretation Paul describes.
Rob, I do not share your interpretation of Dickie.
There may well be many art worlds. I think genres such as fantasy art, erotica and 'traditional' art (those painters who imitate Old Masters) have their own art worlds: means of exchange and criticism exist - dealers and magazines; the genres have established masters and so on. However, they are not part of the Art World, the global network of institutions which defines what is art. Works of these genres would not be found in art museums, because they are not part of the Art World. This fact is what Jack Vetriano's fans were grumbling about. He is hugely popular with people who do not know a lot about art but know what they like, yet he is not represented in any public collection in Scotland.
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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.
"Plutarch said that no talented young aristocrat upon seeing and admiring the famous Zeus of Phidias would want to be Phidias" (Burford, Alison : Craftsmen in Greek and Roman Society, Ithica NY 1972, quoted in Shiner, p23). It is not that "the Greeks conceptualised art and craft as existing on the same spectrum," it is that there was no notion of art such as we have: the Greeks and Romans were "confronted with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, [they] were neither able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art from their intellectual, moral, religious and practical functioning or content, or to use such an aesthetic quality for grouping the fine arts together." (Kristeller, Paul: Renaissance Thought and the Arts, Princeton NJ 1990, quoted in Shiner, p26).
It is we of the allegedly monolithic West who made the works of the ancients into works of art, in the sense that these works are now of largely aesthetic value. Boardman meant what he said.
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The IRD publishes a guide to help sex workers meet their tax obligations.
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I think they've succeeded in restoring NZ to the state it was in when I landed in Auckland in 1997.
Blimey, he's right. That's why everything seems so familiar yet so strange. I arrived in '98 and now we are back where I started. Can I demand a refund?
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I was on a bus, a bus, a **** bus, at some ridiculously early hour in the morning, and that Leighton Smith came on the radio to tell me that Sue Kedgley was a traitor. I did not pay for this, I did not want this.
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Yeah, and you Wellingtonians shouldn't complain: at least you are getting a new statue.
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In the stately homes of England, the Titians and Claudes acquired on the Grand Tour were often set into frames that were part of the architecture, which indicates that the owners had no intention of selling their paintings. The very fact that many of these paintings remain in the houses to which they were brought indicates that they were not for resale.
Collecting as an investment is a relatively new phenomenon. Beside, there are many cases where collectors have donated their collections to public institutions.
Judith Tizard tried to get a royalty system started, but it is very unlikely to come back under this Government.
The truth is, we would not have had art with a big A without patronage.
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Danto, Shiner, Davies et al. It is not exactly anybody's. I don't think it is that unusual.