What is art?

no the real one

You cannot define that in language

Collingwood seems to think that finding something beautiful is just an erotic reaction; something aroused by a preconceived notion of what a craft should do; art, for Collingwood, I think, is those parts of craft which lie in the realm of interpretation, innovation and transgression. Art is anti-aesthetic, in the sense that it is never the same thing. A craftsman with no artistic sensibility, for instance, will already know what his craft will look like, before completing it.

*are, rather

A person, object, or an idea that gives you a dopamine hit.

well picasso said all art is erotic.

HOW TO PAINT:

The symbolic meaning of things, from color scheme, to body langauge, to lighting, theme, motif, this is precept.

The situational meaning of being in this world and interacting with it. a situation which would make you feel as if you were losing control, this is horror, this is affect.

The stylistic meaning. create a style which exudes a certain emotion or emotions and have it be your style, in a way that if someone saw the painting from far away they would know its one of yours.

you should consider space time. the angle, the placment, the framing, the positiong, far away, up close, from behind, above, below, etc. The middle of the day, night, morining, etc. Before, after, during. Messing about with information. Can the viewer see everything and the being in the painting cant? this would create suspense. Can the being see things the viewr cant? this would create mystery. To subvert expectations, give new info about an old thing. let the viewer peer into a far away world, two people across the street arguing.

consider the current age and its zeitgeist
go against the values of the elite.
avoid pop culture
location, location, location
be subtle and indirect
avoid sentimentality

Art should ask these two questions, what does it mean? And what does it do?

a painting is a bloc of sensations waiting for a participants to reactivate it by experiencing it.

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Collingwood may agree with that, in the sense that all shapes probably arouse, on a subconscious level, for erotic reasons, but at that level it is still a mere craft. Just producing something portraying breasts does not make you an artist.

The difference between pornography and erotica is basically the idea of being indirect.

Porn is a woman slobbing on your knob until she pukes.

Erotica is a woman whispering in your ear that she wants to slob on your knob

Erotic is the affect, its "the idea of"

Porn is the precept, its the actual dirty bidness

that which arouses emotion

well an artist is someone who thinks in a certain way. & robert graves said of poetry; to tell the good from the bad is the same as telling good fish from bad, surely from the smell, use your nose - and the real from the artificial: real fish will smell real and artificial fish will have no smell at all

the Greeks believed there was a communion with god during moments of masterful performance. Whether that be craft or sports or war

the greeks had more than one god

There isn’t one. For some reason, and at what point the shift occurred idk, we stopped saying “make” and started saying “create”. Our idea is a craft makes whereas art creates. But this is false. There is no creation, Icarus

Yes, muses. First line of the Iliad “sing goddess...” it’s not the bard speaking.

When have you read a Greek boasting about some great act they performed and how it was the individual Greek who was responsible for the action? Never

Great speeches, bravery in combat, excellence in sport, Etc

i wasn't disagreeing, you just worded it in an odd way
>communion with god

art is creation with intent
this post is art
500 Euro

It is, or rather, should be, a form of communication with the subconscious

Bullshit?

what I like

I wish your mother was art

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well, you have to agree or disagree with the idea that should art be fulfilling beyond its experience or should it just be pure entertainment in the moment. Since anti-art is not at all fulfilling and always only considered amusing or funny since it parodies but it never lasts and sometimes the art it criticized ends up standing the test of time.

they are both porn, and superhero or pulp stories fit in this exact same category where there is always a thinly veiled story used as an excuse to indulge the reader in some form of fantasy.

Sure, but what about that stuff about it being in fact a monotheist religion?

irrelevant, isn't it?

For this thread may be, but I really never got the idea and would be glad if someone could spoonfeed me.

Not him but I disagree in the "erotica" there's room for subtlety, suggestion and symbolism. This for me is the very essence of art. The way you put it makes me think you're imposing some sort of ascetic view on art thus denying it
of one of it's stronger impulses: life.

"The naked lady with a sword on her hands"

symbol and metaphor

there is room for subtlety and symbolism in porn and superhero stories as well, this isn't an either-or situation. Any medium/genre can have a mix of some things or another. But pure erotica, porn, pulp or superhero stories are all just fantasy by their own nature. I never even mentioned anything about art so any conclusions you have drawn from this relating to art are you just inferring.

Not unlike poetry is memoarble speech. Art is that which you experience twice. Once when you first see it. Twice when you remember having seen it, and think about it in a different light. I worked for two years doing security in a gallery for abstract art. I still don't understand it. But once you are alone in a room for eight hours with no windows, artificial light and a 4 by 2 meters painting of brush strokes, you can appreciate it more than a room full of certain maple thorpe photographs...

Craft is superior to art, at least in the modern sense.
For the moderns, art is a representation of beauty, while for the ancients it is taking communion with the beautiful. There is a subtle, but very important, difference in this. Imagine the prominence of a work of art, a painting confined within the farthest reaches of a private mansion as opposed to the sculptural scene of heroism amidst divine warfare in a temple. The latter is not mere representation, but crafted in such a way that the form of the artwork has a vitality in conjunction with the ceremonies and mysteries that will take place there. In opposition to this, the craft of the former is entirely hidden, a technicalism of private recesses which in turn can only be appreciated in another private recess.
It is no mistake that such craft becomes confined within the singular dimension of the canvas, we have abandoned craft in favour of techne, or even worse, a mechanisation of techne. In later developments, the image becomes even further removed, as if the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave were now a craft all their own.
Art is not the central force itself, but the pathing through which ceremony is performed as an ode within memory. The artistic creation can be one of the three of these forms, cultivating the spirit of the others without their being diminished - this is why there is a hierarchy of the arts and yet each is indivisible, has its own sovereignty and equal strength in relation with beauty. A law of the Muses reigns over art, and it is our communion with their memory which separates mere representation from something far greater.
The modernist can only imagine this in a form of completion, a totalism; hence the reign of opera, technicalism, and the formal romanticism of gesamtkunstwerk. This is not in any way intended to detract from a figure like Wagner, since he is of his time and an artist of great value - I only say this in defense of the 'lesser' works, the low art and craft of common people. If we consider the craft and techne of the violin there is an interesting shift that occurs. All of the bow techniques of the fiddler are intended to give life to the music, a vitality which cultivates a feeling of dance in itself, while the violin of an orchestra is played in such a way as to be a mechanical part of the technicalised creation - wherein the seated audience must imagine itself dancing, or communing with divinity. As proof of this difference one can point to the waltzes in which the intricacy of the classical composition falls away and approaches the form of folk music. That music which is created for the dancers is a craft, and more in spirit with the ancient understanding of art.

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(For the bourgeois spirits, or those who simply prefer high art, one could also point to the cantata, where the voice drives the music into its finality, or even pulls the entire form together as if a memory, in opposition to the opera where the human voice stands above all else, the instrumentation giving way to its sovereignty.)
This is an important consideration, especially given our current situation where art seems to have escaped us, been lost in some way. But in contrast to that great marxist claim that the mechanical reproduction of art diminishes the aura, we can say that the aura already begins to diminish before the rise of mechanical reproduction (or really, it has shifted to another source, rather than diminishing it may only be that we cannot sense it). It is also interesting to note that where the bourgeoisie abandoned, and even destroyed, its own creations, folk art has survived (often while under severe threat by bourgeois state measures). And we are at a point in time now where high art is attempting to reconcile with its destructive past - the instruments of chemists, engineers, and pharmacists required to increase the density of a technicalised object - something of an ode to its own memory can be seen in the metastasis of art, a formalism in search of its form (most notable, or even pathological, in performance art). Simplicity and silence takes a formalist position of prominence within the great works of our time. We are left to dispose of the explosive chemical powders abandoned within the pharmacies, and we must do so with care so that the losses are minimised.
After that, and given our unlikely survival, we may be able to return art to its craft, its necessity.
youtu.be/stU7x3iEQ7A
youtu.be/eDFZypkEHzg
youtu.be/PzSlmWQuHFw
youtu.be/1Oc2BNvBhic

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Sensual experience reflected back, but consciously, not in dreams or hallucinations.

An imitation of the real, meant for replaying, reminiscence of the past or some fiction.

Can be wholly realistic or vague and abstract

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art is a lie

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That is just an element of craft, according to Collingwood, which can be artistic, but is not what art is.

Damn, books on this? Where did you guys learn all of this? I really need these recs

>art is just emotion
Why would anyone take this seriously? If you're going to go this route at least follow the metaphysical conception of feeling expressed by Malevich and Bataille.

I never wrote that? Collingwood is essentially reacting to early British Modernism and thinks that art can only be defined by negation, meaning it is open to interpretation, not just emotional, although art can be emotional in a very humble way, such as with much of Romantic art.

Principles of Art by Collingwood is where I got most of my ideas, but I get the impression an understanding of the history of religion and philosophy would help. Maybe Eliade's History of Religious Ideas, Thorndike's History of Magic and Experimental Science and Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

nothing very clever has been said so far in this thread, you're probably better of without. BUT francoise gilot's book about her relationship with picasso has some quite good quotes from pablo.

>nothing clever
Maybe you should contribute something. Although your language suggests you have nothing useful to say anyways.

>Although your language suggests you have nothing useful to say anyways.
what is that supposed to mean?

You're just looking for something clever, which suggests the opposite of an artistic eye.

A creative work which expresses or explores a concept, emotion or a combination of the two

you think the answer to this question should be stupid

I didn't ask a question, but will now. Is English your second language? Or are you just from redit?

the question being 'what is art?'

Creating something realer than reality

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Yes...
Do you understand the connotations of the word 'clever'?

Well I've seen two competing definitions on my time on the internet.

1. Any creative work, regardless of quality, is Art. An objective definition of Art.
2. Only creative works that are of good or high quality from the point of view of an individual can be considered Art. A subjective definition of Art

I lean more towards number 1.

baby don't hurt me

Give us the rundown, picasso. What is the very clever definition of art?

Then what is craft? This definition seems ahistorical.

Which definition?

it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires. if you give spirits a shape, you break free from them. it's very close to poetry.

Both of them.

Art is not inherently magic, but can be magic. I think you are making this up as you go along. Also, art is both literary and visual.

i'd say it is inherently magic, if it's real art.

Objective:
Anything can be art. From graffiti, to a picture of a can of soup, to a piece of programming code.
Anything and everything creative made by man, and even sometimes, by animals, can be considered art. However the quality of said "Art" all depends on the taste of the "consumer" of the art.

Subjective:
Like I said, only the things that an individual subjectively feels like is of good or high quality is art. Sculptures are art, trophies are not. Landscape paintings are art, but paint literally shat onto a canvas is not.
Its a lot harder to define the subjective one, because each individual that has this kind of view of art, has a slightly different definition.
The only thing they really share in common is that the things that they enjoy or think are good are Art, while the things they don't like are not.

There are very humble forms of art, such as those of the Romantic paradigm, which haven't anything to do with magic, really. We are talking about different things, any way. Something like a Celtic knot has some kind of "magic" psychological effect, which can be raised from the status of magic craft in to magic art. What you are describing is probably just art, although Picasso did make use of magic African symbology, so maybe you are on to something.

No, because art is not beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as the platitude goes, because each man gets his prick hard form different shapes, but art is not inherently erotic.

>No, because art is not beauty
Try telling that to someone with a subjective view of Art.

Someone can also have a subjective view of cutlery, which does not mean that, historically, a spoon hasn't been something you drink soup with.

I agree
Which is why you should not debate or argue with people that have a subjective view of Art.

Are you the collingwoodposter?

This is the most confusing comment I have ever seen. It is the equivalent of the /rdt/ shills who call others /rdt/.
Are these the real beliefs of people on this board?

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it's a modified descendent of primitive magic. it keeps the family characteristic of stirring wonder by creating from unpromising lifeless materials an illusion of unexpected passionate life. the african sculptors were against everything; against unknown threatening spirits, so too was picasso. and goya. it was exorcism. .

no.

Yes, but not all craftsmen deal with magic. Picasso is one particular circumstance in which art was mixed with African shamanism.

not all craftsmen are artists (and not all artists are craftsmen)

I know, but art can make use of craft.

naturally.

God you people are fucking pathetic. Art is simply an outward manifestation of some inward human feeling.

I HATE YOU
is this art?

No, it is not, historically speaking. Why should anyone care about your spuriously concocted definition of a word?

To impose a final definition on art is to kill it. A major property of art is that it subverts expectations. The history of art is the outplay of consecutive attempts to nullify previous definitions of it.

So the logical conclusion is that art is all these definitions and more.

I agree. Collingwood says any attempt at an objective aesthetics would be fruitless. You can define art by negation, though.

It wasn't. It's just monotheism later adopted Greek pagan philosophy. Indo-Europeans all had/have the same fundamental metaphysics to their religions, while still having many gods and other beings. Abrahamic monotheisms adopted it and placed it on their one god, and in doing so killed their god. Christianity, at least, has been atheistic since.

Wasn't Judaism largely monotheistic until its adoption of Zoroastrian concepts of a single god? Or were they Akhenatenian? Not sure.

>Collingwood's God

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Check out Preziosi’s Art of Art History or any articles/books by Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss

>American
>Woman
>Meditate with the Moderns
When will you people go back?

Sorry you can’t appreciate their scholarship, user. You can always go back to Ruskin if you want to.

I hope it's love and not obsession, whatever it is.

baby don't hurt me

anything which evokes emotion

>Everybody loves art, 'til they get punched in the face.

youtu.be/Gig6t95hCoQ

It doesn't have to evoke emotion.

That which creates an effect.
That which is done to map your environment.
That which is creative because it reveals something about the world.

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All art is propaganda.

No

Art can be anything as it is a human construct. It does not exist in and of itself. To try to describe or define it in any particular way (ironically including my own) is to draw a dividing line as to what an immensely abstract concept, like love, can only be: which is absurd.

That awesome fucking thing that you love.

Art is in the eye of the beholder. You are fucking stupid like Plato if you think otherwise.

>artificial fish will have no smell at all
This is a wide assumption.

Nah

>porn is the act which brings pleasure
>erotica is the idea which promises the possibility of the act occurring
>if the act does not occur, no pleasure is brought
The question: If a given erotica never devolves into porn, what purpose can it be said to have, if any?

I am never making a thread like this on fourchan again.

One of the things the pushed in art classes is that you need to develop your own definition of Art. But every one just cops out and says " everything is art"
my personal definition is "A unique, original, framed experience. design to create thoughts or emotions in the observer."

Have you considered reading a text on the matter? We are on the literature board, after all.

Best book on art and aesthetic?

Principles of Art - R. G. Collingwood

a bunch of dildos and garbage cans in a museum is art but it's not craft

A reification with an aesthetic "aura".

i can guarantee you no great artist read a scholars book on art to find the meaning

were they really great artists or just self-deluded?

Give me an example of a great literary artist, why they are great and why they are artists.

being self-deluded is essential

then there's no difference between and actual artist and a con artist

don't you know any?

a con artist might read the book on art first

Early British Modernists, like Hulme and Lewis, come to mind, who incorporated ideas from philosophers, such as Bergson and Nietzsche, in to their art. Collingwood was essentially just describing the meeting-point of philosophy and art that was present in that movement. Elucidating it. You see this in the Romantic movement in the arts with Hamann and Herder of the Sturm und Drang proto-Romanticism, also, where they were beginning to develop primitive notions of art and by the time of the Modernists and Collingwood, one finds it on a much more sophisticated level. Romanticism is still art, though, but on a much more primitive level.

But my understanding of the history of literature and aesthetics hardly matters in this equation. You're the one making the claim that art is divorced from history and philosophy.

i can't understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. to search means nothing in painting. to weigh art down with thought or attempt to be poetic is to lose it. the poetic is not poetry. it's even possible that they are opposites. poetry is a product of the unconscious. the poetic is conscious. they stand back to back, and a great number of excursions into the poetic contain not the slightest poetry.

did i make that claim?
it does happen to be true though. if a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all.

This is what Collingwood claims, though. He outlines an anti-aesthetic, not an aesthetic. Art exists in the realm of innovation and transgression and can only be defined through negation.

that is a critical, not poetic idea. which i suppose is why your chosen artists reflected the prevailing analytical spirit. an artist could lose touch with the ideas of mystery, grace and love that originally informed his spirit: intellect and habit starve out imagination.

Intellect can be married with imagination, I should think, and the intellect is not necessarily habitual.

intellect, historically, has been valued at the expense of intuitive truth. take apollo, he was the parton of intellect, not instinct, of metre, not rhythm, of novelty, not timelessness

Even so, Collingwood is simply defending your view.

seems like in the final view he isn't worth much.

How did you come to the conclusion you came to about art, if not through the extinguishing of doubt as regards your pretensions of anti-aesthetic?

there never was any doubt. arrogance is kind of crucial, n'est-ce pas?

Art is inspired creation for aesthetic purposes; craft is (inspired) creation for functional purposes.

How's it going George

There are no objective objects, so how could there be objective objects of art?

emotional encoding

A
Rare
Talent

>to a picture of a can of soup, to a piece of programming code.

fuck off bugman

>ctrl f
>creat
>22

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you make artists sound like philosophers but too lazy to write an actual book

>Art exists in the realm of innovation and transgression
over 100 years of toilets in museums disagree, there's nothing transgressive about it

The things I like. The things I don't like are not art. It's a term to be used for the sake of elevating my tastes above that of the lumpenproletariat.

an idea/experience conveyed through a medium, to be experienced by other people

Whatever makes me hard

Iluminate me, please.

the unforeseen fusion in the poets mind of apparently contradictory emotional ideas

only way to define art is to look at what art isn't. a fake painting no matter how good it is cannot be art. There the distinction between craft and art is made. A fake painting can be a great work of craft but it wouldnt be considered art to anyone.

what about fraud paintings? now a famous art forger elmyr de hory once painting a van dongen than van dongen looked at and swore he painted himself

yeah thats what i had in mind. is it art now? even though the painting may be technically superb its not art but a great painting

then it's not art

what stops it from being art? a man's name?
pic related. which is the real matisse & which is the fake. which is art?

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I'd say a craft is has more to do with practical uses, a technique which acomplish a goal. When art is a purelly aesthetic experience, something beautiful and evocative that it should put the audience in a contemplative state.

Stimulate the imagination, the posibility of devolve into porn but never giving a direct answer, open for interpretation.

are you even reading what im saying mate. much like anything its about the intent. You would say that a fake painting, in other words, purposefully mimicking to fool others that the work is made by someone else is a piece of art? They can both be good pieces of painting

one on the right looks really shit

Both are fake because she's not naked.

Art is something that communicates emotion. That's it. Some things are more artistic than others, but this definition really suffices, I don't get why people have trouble with this.

actually it's

expression + medium + style

>Art is something that communicates emotion. That's it.
Is telling someone how you feel an artistic medium? No. Art is communicating an idea through a medium that can other wise not be explicitly stated due to a sensation or idea that is inarticulable. Diluting the definition down to something so broad mitigates the value of art.

an artist wants to retain his (day-)dreams and preserves the dreamlike quality in his finished artwork. some visions are captured so well in a sketch that it can be already considered art. charlatans abuse this most of all and treat the activity of sketching like proof of their visions. but bad art doesn't reappear in dreams, that's the best indicator. a weaker form of this is memetic propagation, which relies mostly on quantity and not quality. influential art leads to subsidiary speculations about the sacred/profane, archetypes, collective subconsciousness, social function (muh communication, muh escapism) and so on, but artists never profit from such systems. like Actaeon after discovering Diana, he must remain silent or he will be killed by his own pack of hounds.

"Craft is what you sell to the society, Art is what you give to the society."

The destruction of a blank page. That's all it is.

Expression of Soul. Art is manifested from excellent Spirit, through Body and Mind, in the structures/conventions of media. All Art that is from one's authentic Self, is always beautiful. Attainment of Self is a mastery, the actualization of its abundance/realized potential is a skill.

maaate mate i'm saying what is it that makes it art? just the signature? NAH I'M NOT KIDDING MATE

what about white canvas on a museum? i'm sure that's never been done before

A big fart XD

I’m not getting your objection. Is anything art, all is open to interpretation? Is that it?

If a photo of a section of street pavement can be art, so too can that section of pavement, ripped out and hung up in a wall be art. Though no longer a street in either case, it reminds one of what it is or was. A reminiscence.

photography is not art

PHOTOGRAPHY IS A MINOR ART.

Trolling is a art. But you’re likely just stupid, yes? That’s not an art unless you’re a comic. IE trolling

Aesthetic application of human skill

Purposeful patterns clustered in one happening

I learned one thing from this thread:
Never read Collingwood.

Really? How bad is it?

Read this book to find out. 90% of it is online for free.

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I like surrealism, so I went and tried to read their manifesto. this is the opening, I stopped reading there.
>So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.

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my life

competitive video games are a shortcut to divinity

creative work establishing a context for life, the picture is not contextual of life but of death and therefore is inadmissible as art, furthermore there is a lack of creativity, it appears to be capturing a scene from 'everyday life,' which constitutes journalism, not art.

a happening is a different thing

It's fart without "f".

upd: art is shart without "sh"