vince’s ear

This is taken from the introduction of the book Masters of The Renaissance by the author of the vince’s ear blog. The posts Cave Paintings, Early Eastern Arts, and Religious Art are all from introductory chapters from the book.

What Is Art?

What actually is art? If you ask twenty people, you’re likely to get twenty different answers. What art means to the individual relies very much on that person’s upbringing, personality, and beliefs. One’s core values comes into play when deciphering a work of art. Do you look at a splattered canvas and think the artist is a genius for conveying what you think is a strong statement? Can someone find a bunch of tossed away bric-a-brac, glue it all together haphazardly and call it modern art? What is considered beautiful, what is aesthetically pleasing? Is the art tasteful? Does it even qualify as art? In short “art” means different things to different people. Even the mere definition is more varied than the world’s cultures.

And what is culture? To understand the art of the world we must first define “culture.” Culture, anthropologically speaking, is everything about humanity that hasn’t been inherited biologically. In short, it is our human expression. Besides basic human traits and characteristics, everybody that has walked this Earth shared and learned a wealth of knowledge and customs of the people in the areas they lived. Depending on what corner of the land on the corner of the planet one came from, the language you spoke, the clothes you wore, and the means of self expression were generally apart of the culture of your people.

Ever since man became a cognitive entity, homo sapiens sapiens, or “Thinking thinking man,” he has needed to express himself in one way or another. The origins of language could have been a series of grunts and gestures, a way of communicating thoughts and ideas in tangible ways. Long before alphabets and writing came into play, symbols were created to represent ideas, and were painted on the walls and other surfaces to convey messages. This early way of putting ideas into visible cues is the origin of art.

Art, therefore, is and has always been a means of self expression. The power to ponder and associate thoughts and ideas, the ability to differentiate dreams from reality, and the assigning of perceived value and significance to real objects are what separates us from our chimpanzee cousins. Since the beginnings of humanity, our feelings and ways to express them have been a staple for our survival as a species. Once the basics of communication have been established, ways of showing others a higher form of feeling must be achieved.

This is art as we know it. Individuals with their own unique thoughts are expressing it in ways their fellow people can understand. Early art was animals painted on the walls of a cave. Fellow cave dwellers looked at the art and knew instantly what it was and what it meant. Certain methods of portraying people and events in art became commonplace in any given community. The leaps and bounds of art throughout history, however, have been a challenging of such readily accepted ideals. Society as a whole has their own set of values of what is acceptable and many pioneering artists who were ahead of their time were shunned.

Like anything else, art has its fads and fashions. What’s news today is tomorrow’s fish wrapper. Throughout history, each society and period of time had its styles. From early art to recent times, art had a propensity toward realistically representing nature. The figure was portrayed to look human, at first ideally, and then gradually more realistic. The 19th century brought some new ideas such as Impressionism, which sought to express landscapes and events by the impression of the light reflected off surfaces. Eventually the abstract art of the early 20th century challenged realistic representation altogether by showing expressions of thoughts and ideas with no recognizable elements besides colors and gestures. The minimalists made a statement about how art is a continuous subtraction since the beginnings or art, therefore art will eventually be no more than a black canvas. Blank canvases and simple geometric shapes become a fad to demonstrate this statement.

We all know that art and its trends of course did not eventually reduce itself to nothing, and representational art is still very much alive. If anything on may say that art has been cyclic, starting with symbols and basic shapes, going to ideal figurative art, to realistic representation, all the way to photo realism, back to abstract symbols, and finally back to realistic representation again. One thing is for sure, no one can predict the future, therefore it is impossible to say where the art of tomorrow can be headed.

So, in a nutshell, art is what you make of it. You, as an individual, have the power to decipher art, and to express your own art in any way you see fit. Art can exist anywhere. It can be the small crafts one makes for seasons and holidays such as Halloween and Christmas. It can be the consumer versions of these in the form of statues for sale which were mass produced and stocked on the shelves of any department store- someone had to design them, right? Artists of all ages, skill levels, and backgrounds produce their art in their own way. Not all art is going to be as great as Michelangelo‘s David, and this is important in your critiques of what art actually is. Good art, crummy art, corporate art, scribble drawings, advertisements, finger paintings, rug designs, body painting, found art, digital paintings, you name it- it’s all art. So it is unfair to the artist to say that something simply isn’t “Art” because you don’t understand it, and it may not smile back at you like the Mona Lisa.