What is art?

Sakis Totlis · Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 10:52 am Post subject: Re: What is art?

Just passing by very quickly. Busy... busy... busy..., as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

I noticed this brief point by MA: "A good starting point on exploring the division between the Apolline and Dionysic is actually F. Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy".

This is one of the best books I ever read in my life. It is so sober and sensible, that it almost does not look like a book written by Nietzsche. I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who wants to know the historic roots of our present day Apollonian (western) attitudes.

A quick definition of mine: Art is a direct orchestration of pictures (audio-visual, etc), in order to indirectly manage emotions.

And a brief explanation: This is because the intellect (mind) does not have direct access to emotional centers and can reach them only indirectly, through pictures. I mean that if we want to invoke a certain emotion to some audience we project a certain "picture." There is no other way around it.
The context of art is both emotional and mental (containing both emotions and pictures). A work of art (e.g. a literary text) reaches an end only when the material reaches a satisfactory arrangement both emotional and mental.
Of course the artist intervenes directly and willfully only on the mental material of his work of art, (on the "pictures"), and manipulating emotions only indirectly.

Edited by: Sakis Totlis at: 3/16/05 10:05 am

Timothy Schoonover · Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 9:11 pm Post subject: Re: What is art?

I agree with a lot of what Sakis wrote. Images devoid of emotion are by my most general standards, not art. Art is aesthetic, it invokes pleasure...or pain. It causes you to relate in some measurable way, and the breadth of artistic medium directly corresponds to the degree in which consumers are able to be stimulated. Some objects may engender a specific emotion in one group of people, while none in another. What is art to one group is potentially meaningless in another. Is the object art? It is, but not to the observer who has no distinct perspective to associate with it. It becomes art when that observer gains the perspective...which incidently cannot ever be identical to the original artist. Correspondence doesn't matter but that is another ugly conversation worth avoiding.

Art to me, restated once again, is a calculus of the subjective--a re-presentation of one's subjective perspective in such a way that an observer can emotionally relate in some measurable way to the artist.

This explains why old art is often more difficult to relate to than contemporary art and why people get so stuck up on the idea of high art being better. It just means that the artist said something that fucked with them more, lol. Who knows, maybe the next guy don't give a shit. Quality is a subjective value in art.

MadArchitect · Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 10:03 pm Post subject: Re: What is art?

Sakis Totlis: I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who wants to know the historic roots of our present day Apollonian (western) attitudes.

Just to qualify, the Apollonian is not expressly Western -- it relates to form and the ideal, as opposed to the ecstatic, emotive qualities of the Dionysian. Eastern art, I would say, tends more often to conform to the Nietzche's Apollonian impetus than does Western art: consider the Zen forms like haiku and Chinese calligraphy.

I mean that if we want to invoke a certain emotion to some audience we project a certain "picture."

Would it be safe to call this the imaginative faculty? ("Imagination" being, of course, a cognate of "image", and being most often associated with visual sense.) If that's the case, then my hesitation in accepting your definition (which is close in substance to the Aristotelian) outright is that art would seem to be somewhat redundant -- why do we need to externalize a faculty that is inherent in all humans?

Timothy Schoonover: Images devoid of emotion are by my most general standards, not art.

A second hesitation, because the exceptions are a bit too glaring. Unless you're willing to dismiss a rather large portion of modern art, or provide a more encompassing definition of emotion, I'd say that there are about a century's worth of examples of art that are intended not to ellicit emotion but to engage the formal imagination.

It causes you to relate in some measurable way

To say that you relate in a measurable way makes it sound as though aesthetic response were somehow applicable to scientific method. That doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe you meant to say unmeasurable? The phrase "a calculus of the subjective" isn't very helpful in resolving the seeming contradiction, since the aim of any mathematic is the formal objectivity of expression.

Timothy Schoonover · Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2005 1:14 am Post subject: Re: What is art?

Imagination is inherently emotive. It is an identification with the external through objects and means that are internal. The statement that it is a calculus of sorts was not meant to resolve the contradiction you seem to be struggling with. It is only a contraction if you insist on an objective definition. Don't take the term calculus too literally. It is as the subject it decribes--just a metaphor.

I don't think my description demands glaring exception. I have always, although, perhaps inconsistently, maintained that everything is art. Please provide examples of art that would be excluded. If anything I think the description is too broad.

MadArchitect · Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2005 4:39 am Post subject: Re: What is art?

Imagination is inherently emotive.

I wouldn't think so. I can imagine an abstract shape -- a rhombus, for instance. In itself, it has no particular emotional content, nor does it produce emotion.

Please provide examples of art that would be excluded.

Shaker furniture has been prominantly displayed in various art museums for the last several decades. I don't know that they can be said to have any particular emotive function. On the other end of the spectrum there is a great deal of abstract art that deals with formal elements -- shape, color, pattern -- that do not aspire to any particular cathartic or emotive effect. You might consider, for example, "Nude Descending a Staircase", which is a study of motion, or the shape-based works of Mondrian.

Sakis Totlis · Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2005 10:30 am Post subject: Re: What is art?

MA said: “…a rhombus, for instance. In itself, it has no particular emotional content, nor does it produce emotion.”

Well, all sensory data affects emotion, so does a rhombus, which is a shape with sharp edges.

I will give you a simple example. You are a movie director and you want to imply with suitable images the inner (emotional) state of a frightened man alienated from his surrounding.
Would you place him in a chamber full of steel rhombuses or in a chamber full of round and feathery cycles?

Even more, imagine a man tied on a cart moving on some rails going back and forth from one chamber full of steel and sharp edged rhombuses to another chamber full of round and feathery cycles. This will be a torture without even touching the man. This man moving alternatively and haphazardly from sharp steel objects to round feathery objects will eventually lose his emotional stability and he will suffer like hell, because his imagination would not be able to adopt steadily itself and relax within such an unstable and contradicting environment. And this specific environment is contradicting because rhombuses do induce some emotion and namely some quite different emotion than round objects. The only way to induce a certain emotion to anybody is by providing some sensory data to his imagination. All sensory data is represented in our imagination. Otherwise it is called E.S.P. And you surely don’t mean that!

MadArchitect · Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2005 2:03 pm Post subject: Re: What is art?

Loricat: IS an emotional response necessary to have something be labelled Art? I'd say it is -- otherwise it is just a table, not a piece of Shaker furniture.

In that particular experience, what makes it a Shaker tradition is not the audience's response but the artist's background and the tradition that it arises from.

So, 'successful' would mean, to me, that some emotional reaction is created in the viewer.

Part of the point I was trying to raise is that, if we make the designation as art of a given work contingent on its success in producing emotion, then we're faced with the problem of a same work being art in some cases but not art in others. I just don't see why that's necessary when we can always call the same work "art" and note when it is not successful by some other term.

To give another example, we don't cease to call a household appliance "appliance" simply because it's broken. Nor do we cease to call clothes "fashion" simply because we do not find them "fashionable".

Sakis Totlis: Then how do you understand this term if I use the compound term “audio-picture” for a musical piece of art and then further blotting out “audio” as easily understood – since it refers to music?

I would say that, in most cases, the "picture" part of the hyphenated term is superfluous and potentially misleading. Certain musical pieces may have been intended to produce a picture like effect, to whatever extent that's possible without using a visual medium. But I would say that there are an equal number of musical pieces, if not more, whose intended effect is not pictural, not visual at all, but strictly aural. To my mind, referring to music as an "audio-picture" is no less bizarre than referring to a painting as a "visual-song". It may make a certain amount of metaphorical sense, but for the purposes of constructing a concrete definition of art I'd say it only makes things confusing.

Classic music and the opera plays construct the drama (emotions) by adding musical (audio) elements bit by bit for a long time till they are completed in a vast overall pictorial structure evoking sublime emotional depths.

I can't say that I'd agree. Some of the classical pieces that strike me as most effective as art are both brief and structurally simple. By comparison, 1980s hair rock had a tendency towards ornate structure and gratuitous length. Or, to take another example, haiku functions on a set of very strict structural conventions and is just about as brief as you can get with art, yet I would say that in terms of emotion and profundity they are often more impressive and effective than any sestina or long-format poem.

Sakis Totlis · Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 3:27 am Post subject: Re: What is art?

Just before falling asleep and while leafing through an excellent book (Movies as a medium by Lewis Jacobs), I fell (like a deux ex machina) into an excerpt of one of my favorite directors Akiro Kurosawa: “In motion pictures both image and sound should be treated with special care.”

What we have here? In a single sentence we have three terms (picture, image and sound) used quite appropriately. Image and sound are mentioned as the visual and audio content of movie pictures, which are called (movie) “pictures.”
So, why all this fuss? “Picture” is the appropriate general term in English to denote both visual and audio content or any sensory content at all. It is the appropriate term to use when you refer to any picture (visual, audio, smell, taste etc), while “image” means only a visual picture.

Not only that, on the very opposite page (6) Alfred Hitchcock states briefly but plainly: “…My interest (when making a movie picture) is in how to pluck the emotion from people …by juxtaposition of images on the screen.”

Just as I said from the beginning: “All art (and not only cinema) is a direct orchestration of certain pictures (and not only images) in order to indirectly manipulate certain emotions.”

I cannot imagine a single person on earth who will evaluate a haiku as a greater object of art than Beethoven’s 9th. Of course if you compare an unsuccessful vast artistic structure with a very successful short artistic structure then you will arrive at wrong conclusions and impressions.

But do you know why Beethoven’s 9th is ONE object (of art) though it is a composition of millions of musical notes? What exactly makes them ONE and an OBJECT? And then, since it is ONE OBJECT anyway, why would it be inappropriate to call it one (huge) “picture?”

MadArchitect · Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 1:53 pm Post subject: Re: What is art?

Sakis Totlis: So, why all this fuss? “Picture” is the appropriate general term in English to denote both visual and audio content or any sensory content at all.

Maybe in some abtuse English jargon, but in general use the unadorned word "picture" has nothing to do with any sense but the visual. You can use it in a mataphorical sense by saying that someone created a "word picture", but that's only to refer to the use of an author's imagery -- in other words, how they use the written word to conjure up visual impressions.

To understand Kurosawa's statement you have to understand the historical context in which it was made. For the first nearly 30 years after the invention of cinema, there was no mechanically associated soundtrack. Movies were usually accompanied by live musicians, but they were essentially silent. The first film with synchronized sound (and even then only in a few scenes) was "The Jazz Singer" in 1927. The novelty caught on with the public, but for the next decade or so theorists, critics and film-makers debated what status sound should have in the art of film making. There were those who argued that sound was superfluous, but the growing consensus was that film should be treated as an audio-visual medium. Auteurs like Hitchcock used sound in such a way to impress others of its artistic merit in the medium (check out "Blackmail", shot silent, then reshot to add sound and released in 1929). The statement you quoted above is Kurosawa's reminder that both must be treated carefully in order to assure that they are contributing to the overall artistic effect of the work. It's stretching the context a great deal to render it a comment on the use of the picture in art as a whole.

Alfred Hitchcock states briefly but plainly: “…My interest (when making a movie picture) is in how to pluck the emotion from people …by juxtaposition of images on the screen.”

Much though I respect Hitchcock's work (three or four of his films rank in my list of favorite films ever) his statement is explicitly personal. He cannot, in this statement, be construed as having spoken for all artists.

Incidentally, the quote is probably drawn from his series of interviews with Francois Truffaut, highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the art and craft of direction.

I cannot imagine a single person on earth who will evaluate a haiku as a greater object of art than Beethoven’s 9th.

Then you, sir, need to meet more people. There are quite a few people who don't like Beethoven or have so little familiarity as to have no opinion, and likely just as many (if not more) people who greatly admire haiku. I daresay you could fill a good-sized country with the people who would rate haiku more highly than the 9th symphony.

But do you know why Beethoven’s 9th is ONE object (of art) though it is a composition of millions of musical notes?

It's due, I suppose, to what Aaron Copeland calls the "long line". That implies, on the one hand, some sort of uniformity imposed by the artist, either in terms of sequence, spatial arrangement, or similarity -- in other words, composition. And on the other hand it requires engagement on the part of the audience, and the exercise of a faculty of interpretation.

And then, since it is ONE OBJECT anyway, why would it be inappropriate to call it one (huge) “picture?"

Because there are other words in the language that can express the notion of unity without the association (which I assure you is implicit in picture) to the visual sense. We could, in fact, just as easily use the term unity. Composition would also serve, as would the concrete noun form of the work. Or we could borrow objet d'art from the French -- literally "art object".

Mr. Pessimistic · Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 2:23 pm Post subject: Re: What is art?

See..now as a realist and someone who tries to be very rational and detailed in reality...art is one place I would never touch with that kind of rigidity.

You are all trying to codify art, thus making it a mass produce-able object.

Art is what it is. An expression of feeling and emotion of the artist, yet interpreted by the feeling and emotion of the viewer.

THIS is the method of transcendence I prefer from the strictly rational world. THIS is where irrationality should reign.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

I came to get down, I came to get down. So get out ya seat and jump around - House of Pain

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Sakis Totlis · Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 4:39 pm Post subject: Re: What is art?

MA, if you think Hitchock (whose works I truly detest except Psycho maybe) “talks only for himself,” please take this one, too. I just remembered an excerpt from T.S. Eliot (collected Essays) I used as a motto in the head of the last novel of mine (One Dream and Seven Lawyers):

“…The ONLY (the underline is mine) way to express our emotions through art is to find an objective correlative, in other words, a sum of objects, a situation, a succession of events, which would be the formula of this specific emotion, in such a way that, when these outer facts (that would agitate our senses) are given, the emotion would immediately be present.”

In fewer words: “when some “pictorial content” with certain spatiotemporal arrangement is given a certain emotion is present.”

Of course this “pictorial content” is usually meant either audio or visual, but it may refer to any sense at all – why not! (Eliot himself says “that it would agitate our senses” – NOT our vision). Why excluding some senses from such an important aesthetic rule? Socrates made fun of someone by insinuating that since cooking is a very artful endeavor, so all art should not be such a highly esteemed activity after all. According to my opinion little did he know because gourmet cooking surely is a very intricate and highly esteemed art by many.

Now, however, I am beginning to understand why Eliot had such a trouble to express himself in order to denote a “picture” valid for all senses. But do you see what Eliot means by “a sum of objects, a situation, a succession of events that would surely “agitate our senses” (- and not only our vision)? I will give you briefly my opinion.

A situation is how (the mind accepts that) things are in space and time.
A picture is what our perception and our conscience receive directly out of a situation (– via our agitated senses).
A picture for conscience is a direct knowledge.
A situation for conscience is a mental abstraction.

So, a “situation” is meant as something that provides a standard sensory content to our senses and our perception - a sensory content with a specific spatiotemporal arrangement. Eliot speaks of a very specific structure, (a “formula” he calls it), either spatial or temporal – He could as well have said “a pictorial structure”, because a picture is a standard structure, a perfect representation of a situation point by point presented to our senses, to our perception, to our conscience as a spitting image of reality.

And a riddle I put to you: Imagine someone who does not know that there are three dimensions (he only knows two dimensions). How can he escape out of a cycle drawn on the ground around him?
That “someone” who (directly) knows only two dimensions is our perception (that’s why, for example, our perception feels perfectly at home with two dimensional paintings). The third dimension is a mental deduction for our perception; it is something we understand (with our intellect) but do not know directly (with our perception – except from an idea of depth we grasp with our two eyes).

Mr Pessimistic: “THIS is where irrationality should reign.”

I liked that. In art, and even more in dreams, the emotional content is given (it is standard) and the “pictorial content” to express it, conform to the standard emotional needs, no matter how irrational this “pictorial content” might be.

In everyday sober reality, on the contrary, rational perception of reality reigns and emotions should conform to it. Emotions that do not conform to a rational depiction and understanding of reality are pitilessly censored – they are pushed away.

Example: in everyday rational life one may not fall in love with his door knob. One cannot be afraid of a rabbit. Otherwise he is irrational (or stark mad). All these, however, may happen in a dream (or in an imaginative movie – e.g. Harry Potter). As a matter of fact this is how dreams happen all the time.
Situations, and “pictorial structures” representing situations, may be as irrational in dreams as they may – as long as they express a certain emotion, which is the only standard and given in the dream. Even more, it is real. It is an emotion still pending in us from the day before. It is something caused really truly in us by some “sum of objects, a situation, a succession of events that “agitated our senses” during the day before.

In everyday reality our standard rational structures through which we perceive reality are present and have the upper hand. In dreams, and in most works of art, emotions are standard and have the upper hand.
Yes, in many works of art, as in all of our dreams “irrationality should reign.”

MadArchitect · Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2005 2:46 am Post subject: Re: What is art?

Sakis Totlis: Why excluding some senses from such an important aesthetic rule?

The irony here is that it is your word which excludes senses. I don't know any other way to say it: picture refers specifically to the visual sense. It's derived from the Latin word for the act of painting. Much though I hate resorting to the dictionary:

picture n. 1. A visual representation of an object or scene upon a flat surface, as a painting, drawing, engraving, or photograph.

The alternate definitions that pertain to art all make reference to "visual" or "image". That excludes all aural arts, any arts that are visual but extended to three dimensions, strictly tactile arts, and whatever hypothetical arts you can propose using taste or smell as foundations. Honestly, I don't understand your insistence on that word when they are a dozen other words that encompass all the arts without insisting on the visual. And now, unless you can provide some satisfactory evidence to the contrary, I'm going to let that subject rest indefinitely.

He could as well have said “a pictorial structure”, because a picture is a standard structure, a perfect representation of a situation point by point presented to our senses, to our perception, to our conscience as a spitting image of reality.

I don't agree. The representations of art are always characterized by the artifice of an omitted sense. The pictoral arts are all limited to the visual, and more than that, to two dimensions. Sculpture stands in three dimensions, but lacks extension in time. Cinema is extended in time, but not in tactile quality. And so on, and so fouth. There is no art that serves as a spitting image of reality, and some works only find full expression by departing from perceived reality, as with abstract art or cartoon.

The third dimension is a mental deduction for our perception; it is something we understand (with our intellect) but do not know directly (with our perception – except from an idea of depth we grasp with our two eyes).

If you mean that depth is a dimension made possible by the automatic cognitive interpretation of the nervous system, that's true not only of depth but of all the senses. Sound is not received by the ears as sound but as vibration. Vision, even in two dimensions, is the interpretation of the effect of light on compartments of visual purple in the eye -- we see not images but input which is interpreted as images by our nervous system.

Loricat · Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2005 3:13 am Post subject: Re: What is art?

I'm going to throw a wrench into this discussion -- Mad, you've taken it upon yourself to be our devil's advocate, or just the voice of the experienced philosopher, questioning all of our attempts at defining what Art is. I appreciate this, it's a great challenge.

I think we're a bit bogged down though, and I would like to offer a different angle of inquiry: essentially defining Art by outlining what it isn't, just like the artistic concept of negative space.
(This is a concept that is dear to me: a lot of the Canadian identity is made up of what we aren't...but that's a different discussion.)

Lori

Sakis Totlis · Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2005 4:43 am Post subject: Re: What is art?

MA: “The representations of art are always characterized by the artifice of an omitted sense.”

True. And here is the proof of a very artful use of quotations:
MA : “Much though I hate resorting to the dictionary: picture n. 1. A visual representation of an object or scene upon a flat surface, as a painting, drawing, engraving, or photograph.”

Yet, the whole entry is:

Picture n.
1. A visual representation of an object or scene upon a flat surface, as a painting, drawing, engraving, or photograph.”
2. A visible image, especially one on a flat surface or screen: the picture reflected in the lake; focused the picture on the movie screen.
3.
a. A vivid or realistic verbal description: a Shakespearean picture of guilt.
b. A vivid mental image.
4. A person or object bearing a marked resemblance to another: She's the picture of her mother.
5. A person, object, or scene that typifies or embodies an emotion, state of mind, or mood: Your face was the very picture of horror.
6. The chief circumstances of an event or time; a situation.
7. A movie.
8. A tableau vivant.

Note: Only the underlines are mine.
My only comment:

Edited by: Sakis Totlis at: 3/20/05 5:26 am


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