 - Last login: 2 weeks agoPaulherman
- Paul is a single 46 year old person from Arcos De La Frontera, Cadiz, Spain.
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- Member since Jun 04, 2007
Paul Herman is a realist painter working in the Renaissance tradition with impressionist influence. Paintings, murals and sculpture plus Paul's Art-Q quiz, animated shorts, arts and philosophy blog and much more!
Art Workshop in Spain
Herman Studios
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This stumbleupon text editor is useless! Please go to hermanstudios.com/blog.html [hermanstudios.com/blog.html] if you want to read my blog...
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- A statement/criticism more than definition but interesting especially because of its author’s undisputed status as artist: "Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and/or religious truths, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. The revolt of individualism came because the tradition had become degraded, or rather because a spurious copy had been accepted in its stead."
[William Butler Yeats]
- Another statement by a universally recognized authority, Leonardo Da Vinci, said in reference to art: “God creates man translates"
Overall, the etymology & traditional definitions point in one direction with relative clarity, in the words of the philosopher Santayana- “Art is for beauty”. The confusion begins, it seems to me, with Freud, photography, the first world war & its consequent search for new beginnings, we eventually arrive at this kind of definition from Wiki-pedia:
- The second, more recent, sense of the word “art” is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or ‘fine art’ Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the “finer” things. Often, if the skill is being used in a lowbrow or practical way, people will consider it a craft instead of art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it will be considered Commercial art instead of art. On the other hand, crafts and design are sometimes considered applied art. Some thinkers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference (Novitz, 1992). However, even fine art often has goals beyond just pure creativity and self-expression. The purpose of works of art may be to communicate ideas, such as in politically-, spiritually-, or philosophically-motivated art, to create a sense of beauty (see ‘aesthetics’), to explore the nature of perception, for pleasure, or to generate strong emotions. The purpose may also be seemingly nonexistent.
- A definition so broad it hardly seems to qualify as a distinct word, since it essentially allows anything to be labelled as art & anyone to self-designate as artist.
Any philistine can recognise the beauty of a sunset but it takes a Goya to show us the beauty in nightmares. Goya said: Ugliness can be beautiful while prettiness cannot.
I am long accustomed to the response: "Me too", from a great variety of people when they first discover I am an artist. I remember one time, however, when someone I met followed his ‘me too’ with: "I’m a Garbologist!" To the uncomprehending look on my face he explained “A garbage man, that’s my art”. I laughed at what I took to be a joke but as he produced a business card confirming what he claimed, I noted a serious-peeved look, engendered, no doubt, by what he must have taken as a distasteful elitist arrogance on my part.
The archetypical example of the confusion between theory & practice, between novelty & originality, is Duchamp’s urinal proclaimed art by the very right of the
artist who recognizes it as such. A brilliant argument, an original & deep aesthetic philosophy but to me entirely separate from the undeniable fact that though it may even be argued the object has innate beauty in its graceful curves, the urinal remains to me, very simply, a urinal. Dadaism & Duchamp’s elegant language caught the imagination & the idea influenced all art of the rest of the twentieth century & yet he himself didn’t appear to take the object-as-art as seriously as the idea, when he signed it with a tongue-in-cheek pseudonym that made play (in French) on the name of a company that built sewers.
I believe that since the aforementioned influences, WWI, photography & Freud confusing everyone, art’s democratization
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