Category: Unit 03

Paleoanthropsychobiological is a new term created by the author of What Is Art For Ellen Dissanayake to point out that art is a kind of thing which shows human history, includes all human societies, and has psychological effects (p. 1). It is really smart to illustrate art in this way because people will notice this very long word and start to feel curious why art did these much things. Dissanayake used this word to show that art is such a natural thing and it appears in everywhere in people’s life.

It is so hard to define a term like art especially it changes a lot along with human history. The author gave an outline of the changing or history of art in Western concept and mentioned several important turning point. Go back to the very beginning around early treatises, “technē” is a word people first used to describe art, and it meant “having a correct understanding of the principals involved” (p.2). Even though art at that time was not as same as it is now, it was still a very important word in art history. Art has developed very fast, and in the nineteenth century, people turned their attention to “aesthetics” which is “a concern with elucidating principles such as taste and beauty that govern all the arts and indeed make them not simply painting or statues but examples of art” (p.3). People started to separate art with other things in their life and try to make art as an independent area with universal ideas and concepts. Now, art becomes a very general thing and it has so many sub-fields and forms. Like Dissanayake said in her book, a Pandora’s Box was opened as a new term called “postmodernism” appeared (p.5). It becomes less focus on realistic nowadays and starts being diversion; in other words, art is far beyond the view of “reality”, and now it can be anything as long as people think it expresses what they want to.

At the near last part of the reading, Dissanayake gave art a very interesting definition, which is a behavior or an action to “make things special” (p. 10). When art became a part of human life, people were getting tired of seeing same kind of thing every day, so they start to create new types of art. The author regard this new kind of art as something that every people can do and do it for different reasons. She think the common reason that people want to do art is they using art as a tool to make something special. Although personally I think this definition is too general and abstract to be called a definition, it does nicely summarize the reasons that people doing art recent years. It is obvious that art, as a kind of manifestation, changed a lot from the start during centuries, but nobody knows what art could change to in the future. I guess this is the reason why it is really hard to be predicted and defined.

It is very interesting that Ellen Dissanayakewho has fifteen-year lived abroad experience in non-western country start to think about the real meaning of art and the. She starts from discussing that both definition and expression of art are varying along with time goes by. She pointed out that when the concept of art was firstly talked, people took it as beauty or poetry things, and Aristotle expressed it with poetry and tragedy (p.2). In medieval times, “renaissance artists replaced god centered with man centered concerns”, and in 18^th century, “modemity” formed since “a number of social and intellectual trends came together, intertwined and influenced one another” (p.2). Art starts to become unprecedented from nineteen century when “a disinterested attitude that is separate from one’s own personal interest in the object, its utility, or its social or religious ramifications” (p.3). When comes to mid-twentieth century, which was nearer to my life, I can feel what she saying that “paintings became less and less like mirrors, and more elaborate ad abstract” (p.4). In recent years, I find out that more and more art work are very abstract or “postmodemism”, and I can hardly know what the artist want to express without looking at the interpretation, or sometimes I cannot get it even with the explanations.

Dissanayake defined art as “a behavior of making something special” (p.10), and she believed that art is shifting from a kind of objects to an activity. I understand it as saying that art is not only a noun but also a verb now. Personally, I can understand that people don’t want to be alike, instead people want to be more creative or special, but I disagree to give art such a general definition. I once had the honor to attend an art exhibition, and when other people keep nodding towards a painting, I really don’t know what that piece of abstract work trying to express. I know I am not an artist, but I don’t like people regard one thing as Art once they can’t understand it. Dissanayake mentioned that “while there is no abstract concept of art, everyone may be an artist” (p.7), and I think this is just another way to say some “art” works cannot be called “art”. To sum up, I wish art can retain the basic form even through this is not special. We can classify abstract paintings and postmodemism objects into another new category, and just keep “art” simple.