Artifact 2: What Is Art For?

Objectives

Consider the origins of art
Explore a brief history of Western Art
Examine multiple perspectives for evaluating art

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Original Post

WHAT IS ART FOR?

After reading this week’s reading “What Is Art For”, I felt I have a new idea of art. For first several sections, the author Ellen Dissanayake gave us a brief introduction of art history, which I think was really interest me because I didn’t know this part of history before I read it. I had also learned a word called “paleoanthropsychobiological”, which is created by the author. I found this was interesting as well because it showed the attitude of the author regard of defining art. It is very complex and difficult to find a good definition for art. Art combines human history, includes all human societies, and has psychological effects (p. 15). I personally agree with Ellen on this one, and I think everybody would agree that art is an abstract thing. We talk about art everyday: a painting, a building, a picture, or even a people. But how could we really describe what art really is. It is a worth thinking question.After reading this chapter, I had a basic outline about western art history. For example, I knew people use “technē” as a simple term to describe, “having a correct understanding of the principals involved. (p. 16)” During the nineteenth century, more and more people start to talk about 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)” After a long time changing, people would like to think art as a separate thing with other things, and gave it a big enough area to grow. Nowadays, numbers kind of forms of art start to come into our lives. Speaking of art history, it made me think of China. China has thousands years of history, and its art history went through a lot of changes as well. We had drawings on rock, drawings with ink, and so on. It is quite different trend compare to west art history, but I found out that they also have things in common. They both represent the human life in that period of time. We can see how and why art changed in that way if we put ourselves in those shoes. This makes history even more interesting.Speaking back to art, and I keep thinking what art really is after I read that chapter. Art went through that much time, and I think it really is not about form or the way people doing it. Instead, art is a feeing. I like the way Ellen said, art is a kind of behavior or an action to make things special. (p. 25) People should stop defining art or trying to find what art is, people should thinking what art could give back to us. Whatever art is, it makes us happy, makes us sad, brings us hope, gives us imagination, and it just something we cannot live without, and knowing this is enough.

Reflection

I chose this post to demonstrate my understanding of art for many reasons. First of all, I discussed a lot about the origins of art in this post. Thanks to Eellen Dissanayake’s essay, I learned a lot about art history and formation in Western countries. It was so interesting to me to explore these histories because the Chinese art history was so different than it. I briefly mentioned how they are different in my discussion post “What Is Art For? Essay Assignment”, and I said: “I could always compare it with Chinese history so that I could have deeper understand of human history as a whole.” I still believe that comparing two histories in the same period of time is a very good way to learn both of them together.

Another reason I chose this post is it showed my perspectives for evaluating art. Like I said in my post, I agree with Dissanayake’s point that art is “a behavior of making special” and “works of art that art the result of artistic behavior” (Dissanayake, 10). This makes me think of my Artifact 3: Food As Art Reserch that shows how I treat food as art because of its special story. Back to the definition of art, I still have some concerns that sometimes people treat “something that most of people don’t understand” as a guildline of good artwork. Here is an example:

This picture below is a piece of “art” which is a piece of blank paper. The artist says that it is letting people “firing the imagination”. However, to me, this is not a piece of art. I know some people would argue that this work is making someone special for example the creator and people who uses it to imagine. But I just believe this is still a little bit off from the main soul of art. I know I am not an artist, not even close, but I just saying it from a perspective of normal audience.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/blank-canvas-london-gallery-unveils-invisible-art-exhibition-7767057.htmlMy main reflection of this topic is that art is something abstract but not anything that abstract. I know art’s form has been changed from time to time, and people no longer use same guidelines to judge different art works. However, I just want to clear my stander, which is art could be not understand by every people, but it has to create enough value for enough people.

Future Goals

I wish I could do more research on this topic because obvious this is a very broad topic. In the future, I would like to explore what kind of work should be considered as art based on more background knowledge about western art history. In addition, I will try my best to try to understand some art that could not be accepted by myself before because I know art is really a subjective thing, and people have multiple definitions and thoughts for it. So I should break my own limit for art definition, and think about the outside part of this box.