What is art?

“What Is Art For”

After reading, “What is art for” my opinion on art changed drastically. The author, Ellen Dissanayake starts out by giving a brief history of Western art. The term paleoanthropsychobiological was created by Dissanayake to describe the term “art.” Dissanayake uses this term to describe art to show how complex it really is, and how there is no true meaning of “art.” It is very difficult to define art, and Dissanayke wants the readers to understand that. “My paleoanthropsychobiological view is that in order to include human history, human cultures, and human psychology, art must be viewed as an inherent universal (or biological) trait of the human species..”(pg.15). I agree with Dissanyake in this case due to the fact that she is stating how complicated art is, and how it needs to be seen in a universal way because of how different art can be seen to individuals.

Dissanayake uses the phrase “making something special” to show the importance of making something that has a strong purposeful meaning.  She discusses how this is used in ritual ceremonies and how people make a group effort to create an object something of importance with art. “Ritual ceremonies are group efforts to control the important things that people care deeply about” (pg. 23). Another statement that stood out to me was the following, “One can then say that to begin with art was not for its own sake at all, but for the sake of the performance of ritual ceremonies” (pg. 23). The art itself wasn’t important to the group members, what was important was creating something special, referring to a special bond between the group members.

“Renaissance artists gradually replaced God-centered with man-centered concerns, but their works continues to portray a recognizable world, whether actual or ideal, and “art” was in accurately representing that subject matter” (pg.16). In medieval times all artwork was centered around religion, and religious figures, but then Renaissance artists started to head towards man-centered concerns that did not have to do with religion.

The modernism point of view approaches art with a different disinterested attitude. “Disinterest” implied that viewers could appreciate any art, even the artwork of eras or cultures far from their own, whether or not they understood the meaning the works had for the people who made and used them” (pg. 18). In other words this is saying that art is universal in their modernism point of view. They can view art and appreciate the cultures surrounding it, without understanding the meaning or context of that culture but cannot view art in the way they were brought up in.

The postmodernism is a  point of view that challenges the modernism point of view. “Rather than assuming that art reflects a unique and privilege kind of knowledge, postmodernists point out that any truth or “reality” is only a point of view…” (pg. 19). This interoperation of art is based off of a persons unique viewpoint of art and how it comes from personal experience.