Definitions of Art

boing
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AI as it is now (and I am working on using it for image processing) is a very crude and stylised imitation for what is happening in real nerve cells. The models actually get better, and easier to analyse if you depart from the nervous model, and use simple response signals, a synchronous architecture, and separate training and response passes. But I think it does build confidence that a small number of nerves can perform complicated functions, and there is probably no bar to understanding the nature of intelligence.

Everyone who works with calculating machines since Ada Lovelace imagined that machines might think. There were serious efforts in the fifties to get computers that used valves and punched cards to learn and develop new abilities. Computers are not intelligent yet, but we are beginning to see they might be sometime soon. Great days.

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I occasionally write for an erotic literature site. A discussion currently rages amongst authors as to the role of craft in producing smut. Is a ‘stroker’ better received by millions of readers if it well-crafted and/or artistic, or need it merely exploit certain formulae for arousal, no matter the quality of grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc?

Mea culpa: Mere months after first reading their erotica, I thought: “I can write better than THAT!” (I’ve a background in technical writing and editing.) Thus I attempt to craft my stories well, and apply art with evocative imagery, subverted paradigms, and twisted expectations.

I quickly learned that the path to rewards (brownie points: views, votes, likes) is to pander to the audience of any category. Many readers seem not to value either craft or art, merely formulaic arousal.

This is similar to ‘artists’ in any media who find what patrons and audiences like, and churn out batches of that. Are they art machines? On the streets of Antigua Guatemala, former cultural capital of Central America, many ‘artists’ display paintings of the same goddam volcano and town scenes, all well-crafted, all trying to evoke an emotion in prospective buyers. Is that pandering? Tourists can take memories home. Is it art, or wall decoration, or both?

A ‘stroker’ parallel in visual media might be velvet Elvises or funny cat pictures, where quality of craft is irrelevant – the viewer’s emotion is stroked by what they imagine, not by expertise of execution. The mind’s eye sees more than what is there.

So I’ll say that art triggers imagination to stir us. IOW art is what we think it is. Like my grandkids’ drawings taped to the refrigerator door. Art!

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I wrote an essay for First Person Scholar a while back that presented a definition of “game” using a definition of art as a model. Here it is if anyone wants to check it out: Drawing the Line.

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The “artness” of something depends just as much on the response of the perciver of the thing as does the intent of the creator. Thus, an object some find trite or silly that evokes a cathartic response in an individual is indeed “art” for that person.
I suspect the separation of the artist and the crafter started when acquiring certain types of craft became conspicuous consumption. Were really good mosaic courtyards in Rome art? Not to the extent that portraiture is seen as. Rich people wanted to affect visitors by showing that they could afford the most expensive, therefor the best, in things like interior decor, household furnishings and so on.
When industrialization arrived and made fancy stuff available even to poor people, the standards of “art for art’s sake” arrived.
Just as the reasons espoused for a business to exist have shifted from providing a good or service, employing workers and being a net good to the community to being only a generator of profits; so art has shifted from creating something really really well to creating something because you can and you can get others to buy it.

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I don’t mind Duchamp’s ‘Art is the gap’, but, it seems to me, the desire for a definition is to declare that something is ‘not art’ (or less frequently is) – which is patently absurd.

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I will have to watch later.

In general - anything can be art.

Is it GOOD art? That can be in the eye of the beholder, as well as reasoned out to a degree based on various design principles - but also by the message it is trying to convey.

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Ad Reinhardt said:

“The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else. Art-as-art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art… The one thing to say about art and life is that art is art and life is life, that art is not life and that life is not art. A ‘slice-of-life’ art is no better or worse than a ‘slice-of-art’ life. Fine art is not a ‘means of making a living’ or a ‘way of living a life,’ and an artist who dedicates his life to his art or his art to his life burdens his art with his life and his life with his art. Art that is a matter of life and death is neither fine nor free.”

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My definition is this…

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On the other end of the spectrum from fanfic bodice-rippers, I like to think about the really successful art that manages to cement itself into the culture. Shakespeare - when he was writing his stuff - was stringing together words that hadn’t been combined before. But now they are part of the language. Another favorite is MC Escher, whose ideas about infinity would eventually coincide with some cutting edge mathematics. Picasso. countless others… When art is that successful, it helps expand the threshold of what’s possible to talk about, and still be understood.

In that sense, I like to think their work is very much like that of scientists and mathematicians, pushing at the boundaries of what we think we understand. When it’s first presented, it’s edgy, daring… people don’t get it. But once it becomes part of the vernacular, it’s part of the base for everyday interactions.

When Han Solo complained, “It must be some kind of tractor beam pulling us in!” the audience had already been introduced to the idea of a tractor beam by Star Trek, so no special effects were needed to explain what was happening, just one line of dialog covered it. Without Star Trek, it would have taken a whole lot more work to make that scene work. I like to think that all of science fiction collectively builds on itself, performing much the same function as religious writing in an earlier time.

Anyway, I appreciate how the inspirations for artists frequently resemble similar flashes of insight for scientists and mathematicians. When the connection is made, when the heat is on, there’s no neat categories of rational vs irrational, it’s like a kind of lucid dream.

Topics like this aren’t really supposed to come to a definitive conclusion, I think, but they are fun to talk about!

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Art is whatever you can get away with.

Or maybe whatever I can get away with.

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If you can get away with it, sure; but you must consider it art and not merely criminal behavior. Art is attitude. It might still be criminal but at least it’s called ‘art’. Think of artsy pickpockets.

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I have to admit, I didn’t really think of criminal behavior when I typed that. (Mostly just thinking about what I do when I paint stuff and pretending it qualified.)

I do think art has a contextual quality. Picking someone’s pocket or, like, lifting their watch on stage is rather different from doing it on the subway without any intended audience.

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There’s an element to art that I wish would get more discussion: the literal and figurative frame around the art piece. When I visit an art museum. I find myself asking questions about the curation of the pieces, their placement in the halls, and even the building itself. Why isn’t this sculpture out there in public at a train station, why does it need the protection of a museum?

The most extreme framing issues I think, involve art that incorporates the entire planet. When Ze Frank instigated, “Earth as a sandwich” it was with a minimum of framing, he left it to his internet fan base to find some antipodes, and put some bread on each point at the same time. Irreverent, unpretentious, just what I love most in performance art.

Somebody decades before- I forget who - had merely come out and declared the entire planet as a piece of “found art”. Same joke, but much less funny.

And then there’s the artist who inscribed a tetrahedron inside the globe of the earth, and planted 4 small sculpures at the corresponding points on the earth. A lot more effort framing his idea, for a somewhat more complex idea.

If it’s criminal acts you want to talk about, there’s that huge environmental piece that Christof installed in California I think, where the sculpture came down in a high wind and killed a motorist. Imagine dying for someone elses’ art piece!

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One of my college roommates (art major) and I had this conversation often. On semester she failed to pick up her portfolio from a drawing class until too late, and it’s all been tossed in the dumpster with everyone else’s work that wasn’t picked up.
Then she turned to making art quilts, because she wanted to make her art on something that had inherent value even if someone didn’t appreciate the art. (Her quilts were beautiful and also cozy).
So she ended up having a lot of conversations with professors about art vs. craft.
I never really bought on 100%, (or even 50%, really) but some of the things she mentioned got discussed were craft always being functional, where art may be functional, and art being something where you made and discarded multiple attempts first versus craft being something where almost every started attempt becomes something.

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I’d be more interested in this category of “artificial intelligence” if there was also a sister discipline about “artificial stupidity”. Human beings so often punch below their weight -intellectually speaking- and this phenomenon could really use some serious study.

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“ART is just the last three letters in FART.” – Gibby Haynes.

But seriously, I think it was Zappa who said “if you put a frame around it, then it’s art.” And the ‘frame’ could be metaphorical, so John Cage penning sheet music with no notes was a frame of sorts.

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Because galleries and museums exist to concentrate the sculpture rather than involving trips round train stations and many a sculpture in a public space has been vandalised or is, especially obvious in recent times, not deserving of or is actually offensive in public display.

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Exactly, and that’s why I think the term “AI” is plainly misleading. But that is of course a battle long lost. Still, in my native German, whenever I can I insist that the “I” in the corresponding abbrevation “KI” (“Künstliche Intelligenz”) actually stands for “Inselbegabung”, a non-derogatory term for the skills of an idiot savant.

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Fish.

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I used to approach this problem from a slightly different direction with a view to answering the question - What is design?

I would ask students - What’s the difference between art and design?

And then I would flippantly say design is solving a problem. If you aren’t solving a problem, you’re doing art.

I know this isn’t precisely true but serves well to illustrate a point and I do explain this to the students.

My theory goes like this. Any man-made object (even art) can be analysed using the approach of examining its Form (shape, colour, material, size etc.), Function (what does the thing do and how well does it do it?), Feeling (what are the semantic and emotional properties of the item. Is it friendly, dangerous, dependable etc) and finally, Context (this is a reevaluation of the Form, Function and Feeling with regard to who is using it, and where and when it is being used).

This approach allows for an understanding of made objects without being didactic about it.

So is a poster for a gig, Art, or Design?

Well, it has form (Generally flat rectangular, with colour, maybe images and words), a function (Generally it will have two functions. Firstly, it needs to grab attention and secondly, it needs to communicate some information) and it will have a feeling (A rave poster feels different to punk poster and they both will feel differently to a classical music poster). And the context could by posted under a flyover, or on a teenagers bedroom wall or framed in a exhibition.

So it is definitely design. But it could also be art.

Art obviously has Form, Feeling and Context but does art have a function?

Well it could be decoration, that’s a function.

But probably the function of art is to provoke an emotional response (which might be different to the Feeling of the physical piece itself).

So, anything that has been mediated by someone can be art if that is the intention of the creator, or the perception of the viewer.

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