An Attempt to Define Art - Continued

Throughout the corse of this class I have been trying to piece together my own little theories about art here and there between my blogposts. After having created the image that I did to help explain my equation from the first week, I tried to help explain one of the variables used in the equation, thus this post is to help explain Inspiration, based roughly on how I thought of it when reading Tolstoy:

In Response to Davion

In response to Davions Post:
http://hartphilosophy.blogspot.com/2011/02/with-great-power-comes-great.html#comments

Interestingly enough, I would say that you are right about the fact that art can be one of the most influential things that humans as individuals can create. When it becomes a question of power though, the answer is substantially more difficult to come by. For I would be put in the position to say that Art is only as powerful as we let it become.

Now strangely enough, the thing that makes this conversation interesting is that I feel there is at least one other variable to attend to when considering the power of art. For when you think about it, if we were to assume that this sort of power can be derived from art, then there must be something that seperates one piece from another.

To me, the answer is all about the masses. The dangerous, powerful artist is the one that can create a piece of work that convey's the same emotion to the largest number of people. If an artist can create great pieces of work that influence masses of people to believe in and follow their ideals, then art would be just as strong as any other form of influential communication. This would be a scenario to which the use of art would be to much power for people to control. Once this has been determined though, would we consider things like advertising to be a similar threat?

Response to Kate's Post

Personally, I would argue that perception of what is art has very little to do with the limitations of what can be art. Rather, the perception of art is more similar to the idea of Aesthetics to me. For one who understands their personal aethetic value for something in conjunction to understanding the aesthetic potential of others around them is what leads to art.

Now that being a little bit much to take all at once, to simplify I would say that human's naturally understand what is art to them and to people around them, it is an instinct of sorts. When it comes down to analyzing a specific piece of work, if it cannot be understood then it is an error of communication of one of the two parties involved (either the creator or the observer). These types of errors are the loopholes that crack through society and create the problem of your questioning of your own perception of the whole.

Do you feel that this analysis of perception helps you to follow through with what your original intent of understanding art was?

Defining Art

Today in class we talked some more about a good means as to how we can properly define art. As it turns out we discussed the definition this time in the format of an equation, to which I thought was a particularly appealing idea, so I started working on what I think is my appropriate understanding of art and how it can be defined.

What I came up with was an extention of the equation that we had in class that I feel incoorperates all aspects that I think are necessary in properly describing what art is and why it is important. The equation accomplishes two things: it shows what art is, and also gives an interesting way to determine if art is valued amongst people of the art world, and it looks like this:


How do you feel that this equation does to define art? What differences do you think make it stronger or weaker?

Response to Andrea

To attempt to answer your question and touch on additional things that you mentioned in your post, I have two opinions.
First off, I'll try to answer your question, to which I think that the necessity to try and define art is more significant than it seems. Mostly because if we could come to some sort of concrete answer as to what art is and why, then lots of other things would become certainly much easier to answer by classification. Additionally, it is a frustrating thing to have a word that everyone in the world knows and understands, but can't be truly defined in a concrete manor. All in all, it would be nice if there were some sort of constant that we could agree on and attempt to hold against any formidable question.
Secondly, there is the string of comments that you left in your last paragraph, to which I think are very interesting. I think that the idea of philosopher's not defining words and ideas is incorrect; in fact I almost feel it’s the opposite. To my understanding, philosophy is a practice of unbiased understanding and proving of truth, to which defining art is a paramount example. To look at art philosophically is but to understand what art is and why it is significant to all things that it affects.

Do you still disagree?

Artists vs. Nature

Today in class we mentioned the currently indistinguishable difference between art created by people, and art that is beautiful of its own existence out in nature as to whether these things qualify as art itself. Interestingly enough, we mentioned that artists specifically try to immitate what we know as the world via the skills that they have in manipulating different mediums to accomplish this.
With both of these things having been mentioned, I feel that it is interesting to take note of people who have been studying computer graphics with the intention of making the artistic world that we view much more "beautiful" than our own real life could ever allow. As an example of this, consider all of the work that went into the movie Avatar, this level of artistic manipulation is stagering enough that many people can sit to watch this movie and feel like a part of the environment that has been laid out for them.
Considering this ideal of creating an artistically better world, is it possible that artists are working towards the idea of creating something along the same lines as The Matrix to keep people entertained? Are we going to eventually need to give up our reality with the ideal of art as its replacement to keep ourselves entertained?

What are your thoughts?

Art and Philosophy

Hey there everybody,

So I took the honors Nature of Human Nature class with David last year, and seeing as I enjoyed using this blog so much, I will continue my posts for the Art and Philosophy class this semester through this blog.

Please note that none of the posts previous to this one are relevent within the Art and Philosophy class, but if you are interested feel free to read through some.

Oh, and also, I put a new link on the places to go tab on the right side of the screen, I promise its not a virus, its just something interesting for you to keep busy with that i'll change with every post I put up, so be sure to come back and check it out.

Thanks, and hope for a good semester!

Alex