ART006: Week 1 Readings

Freeland, “Introduction”

• “A theory is more than a definition; it is a framework that supplies an orderly explanation of observed phenomena.”
• Modern art challenges as to why something is art
• Theories guide our value judgments
• art manifests itself differently for each culture
• current art is shocking
• aesthetics seek to explain why art is valued and what meaning it may have

Freeland, “Blood and Beauty”

• blood has similarities to paint
• blood is the human essence
• blood can be holy or noble
• blood can indicate passage to adulthood
• blood can be contaminated
• art as ritual
• blood rituals common to various cultures
• although blood used in rituals are part of the cultural fabric whereas there is not common tradition to draw fro when exposed to art using blood
• Ron Athey who is HIV+, hung blood-soaked rags above an audience causing a panic
• Sometimes difficult to tell if use of blood is shocking as art or commerce
• John Dewey feels artists must exaggerated their separateness to compete in the marketplace
• Shocking use of bodily fluids often used to comment on religion
• “Artwork that uses blood or urine enters into the public sphere without the context of either well-understood ritual significance or artistic redemption through beauty.”
• Aesthetics derives from Greek word for sensation or perception
• David Hume and Immanuel Kant struggled with defining aesthetic value and why some art was better than others
• Hume posited that “taste” was learned and acculturated
• Kant felt that aesthetic taste was a function of the artwork
• Kant’s way of recognizing beauty has “purposiveness without a purpose”
• Beauty may be a function of how “right” something is
• Kant felt that enjoyment of beauty was distinct from other sorts of pleasure
• Kant believed God did not play a part in beauty but human genius
• “’Significant for’ is a particular combinations of lines and colours that stir our aesthetic emotions”
• Bell insisted art should have nothing to do with life or politics
• Bullough felt sex and politics tend to block aesthetic consciousness
• Lippard’s defense of Serrano: 1) formal and material properties, 2) content and 3) context
• Catholic churches hold vials of talismanic items
• Goya witness to several European wars
• “Goya’s art made people confront the dire possibilities of human nature in moments of extreme crisis.”
• Goya’s Horrors of War series made commentary on the legacy of the Enlightenment in contrast to atrocities carried out
• Artwork in recent years has incorporated a lot of horror

Art in Theory, general introduction

• The literature of modern art is massive and difficult to access
• 2 difficult and interconnected question: 1) how is modern art to be defined and 2) how is the field of its relevant interests to be circumscribed?
• Questions about historical narratives
• Problems of definition and historical organization
• Modern art begins with the end of the 19^th century
• “the practice of art constitutes a form of participation or intervention in the social process”
• Modern art cannot be equated with Modernism
• Theory is determined post hoc to practice of modern art
• Representations are determined by social group
• “the reading of art theory needs to be accompanied by a calling to mind of art itself”
• Lack of context is one of the major barriers to the study of Modern art
• Can art theory be distinguished from political, social or philosophic theory?
• The awareness of history animates the understanding of art
• Modern art should not be viewed out of context

Williams, “The Analysis of culture”

• 3 general categories in the definition of culture: 1) the “ideal”, 2) the “documentary” and 3) the “social”
• The variations of meaning and reference are a “genuine complexity”
• Considering art theory must be done as a whole
• There is no element that can be abstracted from the rest
• Art must be analyzed from the cultural perspective but not assumed to be determined by it
• We must look at artworks and theory in context to know its social value
• The history of a culture must take into account the relations to society and context
• Cultural history must be more than the sum of particular histories
• “the theory of culture as a the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life.”
• In studying historical context, the flavor of the times will always be lost
• 3 levels of culture: 1) lived culture for those in those times, 2) recorded culture and 3) the culture of selective tradition
• “cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection and re-selection of ancestors”
• “We tend to underestimate the extent to which the cultural tradition is not only a selection but also an interpretation.”

Stiles, general introduction

• Clement Greenberg coined the term “modernism”
• Greenberg argued advanced art moved from greater to lesser complexity
• Greenberg required each artistic medium to become self-referential
• “The modernist paradigm is generally understood to reflect rational liberal humanism and a belief in progress established during the Enlightenment.”
• “The advent of postmodernist contingency placed modernist objectivity in doubt”
• The modernist belief in truth replaced by radical relativism
• Visual art encompasses many more forms
• Artists began to use new modes of expressing their theories on art but widely neglected
• 3 foundational concepts shaping art historiography: 1) the centrality of individual artistic authority, 2) its links to the creation of unique objects and 3) the hierarchal position of painting and sculpture in cultural production.
• Past art historians were rarely questioned but modern art historians may be continually questioned
• “theory industry” emerged in the 1980’s
• The culture industry connected to the “consciousness industry”
• Art theory forced to take on any roles
• “the best artist is a dead artist” because they cannot argue with the historian and critics retain the authorial voice
• Artists reject analysis of their works
• Text and object as the object of theoretical discourse
• “when theory by artists becomes art, emotion is read to triumph over reason and knowledge.”
• “Artists’ theories and statements are a part of the material evidence and conceptual apparatus of their work and must be understood as an integral component of art historical and critical theory.”

Dissanayake, “What is art for?”

• Humans have always engaged in art
• Our view of art controverts its biological and evolutionary significance
• Making “art” is not what matters but “making special”
• Art is a normal and natural evolution as language
• Art should be viewed from the larger, global, historic view of man
• Western art produced as a commodity is anomalous in the global scope
• Art viewed biologically as a universal behavior that characterizes our species which contributes to its survival
• People in modern times don’t have time to consider their experience
• No value judgments in making art special, neither good or bad
• We let artists make things special and then purchase them
• “decorating or adorning were ways of showing that one participated in a social order and was a moral member of society”
• Art used as a means of escape and disconnected from its social role, as an individual pursuit
• “Hillman also says that we have become so individualized and conditioned to experience ourselves as separate, we know have an actual fear of community”
• “we’re no living in the environment for which we were adapted as a species”
• “we are really hunter-gatherers thrust into a kind of supermechanisitic, anonymous, hypermediated environment that we’re not preadapted to live in.”
• There is a limit to adaptation
• “we’ve somehow created a world to which we cannot adapt, in which we cannot humanly live”