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Practical Art |
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Sunday, 23 January 2005 |
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This is something that has been on my mind for some time, now, brought about by various people's reflections, and now by my recent discussion with Marie-Eve (just look at the comments from the previous days...).
I don't want to reinvent the wheel here, and the subject of what is art has been beaten to death and beyond by art historians and critics and artists for a very long time. But I'll just try to get my own opinion in writing, and hopefully it will bring some insights that I hadn't thought about.
Art and photography are somewhat at odds with each other, from what I see around me. Why is it that there is something called "Artistic photos", which implies that some photographs are not artistic... Are there some non-artistic paintings ? or sculptures ? Agreed, when you paint your wall blue, it's not necessairly art, and when you build a house, or a car, that can be equated to sculpture, and thus constitute non-artistic sculpture...
Is it the same with photography ? Are there photographs, like the ones you have on the cover of your favorite daily newspaper, that have only an utilitarian, non-artistic purpose, and photographs that have a distinctive artistic quality ? And where is the line between the two drawn ?
Now, some schools of thought consider all man-made objects as art in some form or another. Pratical, down-to-earth art, but some creativity is involved somewhere along the way to create anything from the computer you're reading this on, to the chair (or couch) you sit in, to your books, furniture, even a simple cup of coffee might be considered a work of art.
That basically mean we're all artists, in one way or another, and that brings the question of the status of artists, what give more right to someone to call him or herself an artist ? What makes an object be considered art, and another to be considered only as an object ? A visit to any conteporary art gallery can be a very confusing experience for anyone trying to answer this question. A museum here is Belgium had an exhibition last fall called "The removal of the museum's glass windows" which constituted, in short, into ripping out the doors and windows from the building and leaving it open to the elements, empty, for a few weeks. What I understood out of this is the desire to open museums to the outside world, to try and be less hermetic in the contemporary art approach, but still, it left me with a bitter after taste of "what the heck is the point of all this ?"...
Let's continue this another day, shall we ? |
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