Posts by Paul Litterick
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The public notion of art surely is explicit in the idea of an Art World which I described, particularly as it included the interested public.
I was thinking of a status-object as something that denotes the status of its owner, like a crown. I would imagine the beads Dyan describes fulfill that function; like the Fabergé eggs which the Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II commissioned, they are intricate, rare and obviously expensive.
Some wealthy people have collected art ostentatiously; others more quietly. The importance of collecting as a signifier of an art culture is that the works are collected as art, not for another purpose. Of course, an especially devout person might collect religious paintings as objects of veneration rather than things of artistic value, and a dog lover might buy many paintings of dogs; but other historic collections show that their owners were interested in art as such, and in the work of particular artists.
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But I disagree with you Paul on a couple of points. First, that indigenous cultures did not create objects that were neither practical, ceremonial nor anything but objects of beauty.
But, as your example indicates, they were status-objects. The public notion of art, that it is something shared by a culture, is part of the Western construct.
Also - the assertion that primitive art was static is mistaken..
I agree: there are evident changes over time and space, which follow patterns of migration; there are also practices which are unique to particular places, such as Chatham Islands dendroglyphs.
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But you are the one who is condemning my Department for being full of "nonces" (do you really mean to say we are sex-offenders?) with a quaint colonial mindset. But my Department has people teaching and studying art from many cultures, so what is your problem?
And still you think I have a issue with culture being plural. My point is plurality: that the Western construct of art does not naturally occur in other cultures, historical or geographical.
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Somehow the quaint colonial mindset that "art" requires a functioning capitalist market for oils and busts along with universities full of nonces just like the homeland seems to have survived exposure to our local Auckland University art history department...
Oh look, here comes Anti-Intellectualism on a pale horse. What is the problem with studying a "wide variety of different cultures?" What would you have us do instead?
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Given that he's clearly having a discussion about a different definition of 'art' (as you say, capital A) than (I think) everyone else was discussing (actual art objects) I've moved on.
I am really only stating a description of art that is more or less standard, with the added PoMo twist of identifying art as a construct.
If the European tradition of art doesn't like what gets put up, it can go shove it.
The proposed statue is in a European tradition, just not a very pleasant one: it looks like a monument to the victors of the Great Patriotic War on the outskirts of Omsk. Why should observing the European tradition to the extent of employing a real artist be so difficult? Why not show some awareness of what is going on in contemporary public sculpture? And hey, we have many Maori and Polynesian artists working as artists, so it does not have to look like a Rodin.
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John Boardman (one of the greatest historians of Greek art) wrote: "'Art for Art's sake' was virtually an unknown concept; there was neither a real Art Market nor Collectors; all art has a function and artists were suppliers of a commodity on a par with shoemakers."
Eirc Havelock "...neither 'art' nor 'artist' as we use the words, is translatable into archaic or high-classical Greek."
Shiner again: As offensive as it may be to our postromantic sensibilities, Aristotle belived that the artisan/artist takes a particular raw material (human character/leather) and uses a particular set of ides and procedures (plot/shoe form) to produce a product (tragedy/shoes)
The grouping together is the making of the construct. Just as the Greeks grouped the arts and crafts together (albeit trying to make some distinctions between the imitative and the merely mechanical acts), so we have put them apart and (in the late 19th Century and today) brought them back together.
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Keith hits the Herald pages again.
They are outsourcing their intelligence again.
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Perhaps more like looking at a roadsign and assuming it is an abstract painting, or reading the painted instruction on the road as "child that mind."
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No, Rich, quite the reverse; I am saying that art is a construct, that it is a set of practices that were devised in 15th Century Europe and considerably refined in the 18th Century. My opponents in this argument are taking the essentialist and universalist lines: that art is somehow natural and that it is found everywhere. So they see traditional practices of indigenous peoples that are similar to art in some respects and conclude that they are seeing art. This is the imperialist fallacy, if you will, to assume that other peoples are like us.
Anway, back to the fray. Funfacts: those Ancient Greeks and those slightly less Ancient Romans had no word for art. As Larry Shiner (The Invention of Art, Chicago 2001) puts it: "Techne/ars embraced things as diverse as carpentry and poety, shoemaking and medicine, sculpture and horse breaking."
Same goes for the Chinese: Quoting Craig Clunas , Shiner says "no one in China grouped painting, sculpture, ceramics and calligraphy together as objects 'constituting part of the same field of inquiry.'"
The Japanese as well had no collective name for art until the 19th Century. Why the 19th Century in both countries? Because that is when the Europeans started buying their artefacts. The idea of art was exported as a result of trade.
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They made art. Did they not know what they were doing?
The identification of some activities as art is a European phenomenon. There were comparable practices in China and Japan but not an art culture of the kind that Europe developed. I don't think such practices or such a culture developed elsewhere.