On Apr 27, 2009, at 9:40 PM, Saul Ostrow wrote:
sometimes they come up with hash other times something that may be called art
Isn't everything an artist comes up with--i.e., makes--art? Maybe bad art, poorly made art, ill-fitted art, unmoving art, dull art, but art nonetheless? (And to be clear, I'm not talking about making a dessert or a dress or a shopping list. I'm talking about whatever an artist consciously makes in the studio, or wherever he or she makes those things that can or may be called "art.")
Often different writers on this list assert that "art" is a qualitative achievement, that if a made thing is of sufficient quality (defined somehow) then it can be called "art." And the implication is that some things made in the same fashion as a 'work of art' may lack attributes of quality in such degree that they cannot or should not be called "art." Then they're hash or some other species of made thing.
I think this is an error, a wrong way of looking at these made things. It shifts the burden of proof, as the lawyers would say, to the judge, not to the piece and the maker. Is it good enough? Often, the unspoken criterion in this question is: for me? Not for the artist, who, we assume, believes it is. But for the viewer who projects his or her own scale of evaluation on it, with the result that we get an on-going dispute, not only over whose work exceeds others, and whose lasts the test of time, and whose old paintings are deficient and piecemeal, but over whether a work "can be called 'art'" because fashion has abandoned it. (Remember, Shakespeare and Michelangelo fell out of favor for long periods of time.)
I return to my basic thesis about art: it is made in a way that is entirely independent of contingent requirements. It doesn't have to appear a certain way, to construct its correspondences to life or the stuff "out there" in any way that can be assayed and proven by epistemic truth tests. Some of these things succeed admirably well, most are middling, and a good proportion of them are mediocre or worse. But they are all art, from the clumsy seascapes in the shopping mall displays to an apse mosaic in St. Apollinaire in Classe, from a woman with a green nose to a Kiefer.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected]
