Rohan writes in the descripton of the “What Is Art?” Facebook group:
Art doesn’t have to be snobby and exclusive – we each have our own ideas about what is and isn’t art. Tell us what YOU think art is by submitting a picture, a poem, a story – anything! – along with a sentence or two telling us why you think this is art.
At his insistence I sent him a picture I had “drawn” some years before.
I’m not sure if I’m necessarily an artist or if this is necessarily ‘art.’ However I like it. I ‘drew’ it in the early 2000′s when I was living in Sydney. It is one artist’s rendition of Sophie B. Hawkins who is – and has been for many years – a great hero and source of inspiration to me. At the time I had been dabbling with little cartoon like figures using nothing more than photoshop and a mouse. I made a remark about wanting to draw Sophie to a friend. I had all but given up in my attempts when I dabbled a bit further and came up with what you see here. To me, even with my shaky mouse hand and amateur art skills, it really encapsulates her innate beauty and sexuality. I love how unpertubed and unafraid she seems in the rendering, as if the world was really hers – perhaps hers alone – to conquer. I like the basic colours. I like the slight variations on shades to create depth and interest and a sense of shadow. I love how her face, hair and features are carefully defined with a black outline and yet somehow her neck just blurs into the ether and into the background.
Eerily – and this is something I hadn’t considered until this moment – I had the opportunity to meet and photograph her years later. I remember now that in our first “meeting” at a JB Hi-Fi store in Sydney that she actually closed her eyes to sing in a few places. And I was there taking photographs with my first camera – a little Kodak thing. It was so surreal.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I think ‘art’ at a base-level is somewhat twofold.
You can create art to express yourself, and how you see the world as much as you like, and that’s perfectly valid, you are creating what you see as art.
I don’t think what you are creating becomes art until a number of people external to you and what you are creating can look at it and be moved in their own way.
Both are valid, I think, but Van Gogh is probably a good example. Before he died, he was a painter creating what to himself was art, but after he died and the public started to respond to his work is when he could be defined by the public as an artist.
Is that making sense?
Also to answer the question – is that art – given that I’m responding to it based upon the principles you’ve laid down as the creater, you could argue (based upon my own definition) that it probably counts. But I would say that it’s been created by a blogger (or what have you) not by an artist – not until you reach a critical mass of people feeling things about the picture, and (perhaps more importantly) you have together a significant body of work.
I have always felt that if the creator makes it with the intention of it being art, and if you see it as art, then it is art, no matter the mediom or style. if you think it is art then it is art, or if someone else considers it to be art then it is art. even if only to them.
p.s. I definitely think the drawing is art. =)
her lips look like they just finished receiving a kiss. And remember, the simplest definition of art lies in ‘the intention of the artist.’ The definition is quite fluid, and perhaps vague, but I stand by it. If the creator intends it to be art, it is. Some might argue that it requires emotional expression, but that would exclude any art forms that were made in an emotionless state. She looks like she could be in the center of the universe.
Art: noun: the reflection of beauty.
However, this merely conflagrates the answer with a basic substitution of nouns; what then is beauty?
Putting the obvious regressive problems aside, art is traditionally seen (at least from the enlightenment point of view in all its objective bias) as being the intentional creation of man so as to mirror nature, without being nature itself. A work of art thus expresses the universal representations of nature in such a way that can only be achieved by the mastery of the artist over his domain and own situational being.
However, the art/nature paradigm has long since been washed away by the fierce tides of 19th Century romanticism, and the subjective doctrine defining art as an expression of one’s inner humanity, regardless of its correlation with the objective natural world.
This in turn was washed away by modernism and post-modernism successively (or as some may say the invention of photography).
There is something to be said for the analytical notions of ‘institutional aesthetics’ which defines art as a socially constructed norm. In this case, art is whatever ‘society’ deems reasonable (or realistically, whatever the National Gallery decides to hang on its walls).
But that discounts the bulk of artworks that either never get displayed, or are never intended for display.
I think the paradigm challenge for the definition of art is to reach a conclusion that can incorporate works such as those of the great French artist Marcel Duchamp. He famously displayed a urinal in an art exhibition and called it art. He stuck a bicycle wheel onto a stool, not intending it to be art, but it was. And not only was it art, but it was good.
Given these works, art seems to exist on an epistemically relative basis. If something is perceived to be art, then it’s probably art. That’s not to say that everything is art. It is a necessary precondition that a work be perceived to be art as such. Not everything should fall within that category, even if the concept exists only on a basis of epistemic relativity.
Remembering Hegel’s thesis that the 20th Century would see ‘the end of art’ is worth noting here. If everything can be something, then that thing is usually nothing. Have we seen the end of art? If art is relative to particular judgment, regardless of its universal aesthetic, then there’s not much point in attempting a universally concise definition.
Given the indefinability of art, except on a relativistic basis, I think it is necessary to base what we view as art on the discernment of good art from bad. Too often you see people walking through galleries, viewing minimalist works with confusion and contempt, muttering in a hostile tone, ‘that’s not art!”.
But it is art. It’s just not good. However, what we perceive as good in art, like the definition of ‘beauty’ is an issue for another debate.
To answer your question: yes, your drawing certainly is art. But is it any good?
Perhaps that relies on a greater exploration of the universal maxim of what’s good in general.
But I think it’s pretty damn good.
I really like this. Looks like art to me.
Thanks for Rewinding at the Fibro!
{ 1 trackback }