Louis Katz on wed 15 jun 05
On Jun 14, 2005, at 7:09 PM, Janet Kaiser @ The Chapel of Art wrote:
> It is not art when a baby fills its nappy,
I agree. Its not intelligence that causes this to happen. The smearing
is another story. Your description of what is art seems to fit what I
call transcendent definitions. In some way these definitions can be
cheapened but easily described as, "its only art if it achieves a
certain level of quality". For one of my friends this quality can be
described as, G-d-like. For him its not art, just junk, until it
transcends normal experience.
I find the sliding scale of art that transcendent definitions produce
reasonable. even productive. Its when these definitions institute a
hard line, "This is art, this is not". That I have a problem with them.
I want drywall to have more meaning. I want cloths, nails, gardening,
even waste disposal to add more meaning to life. Maybe they are not
capable of much, but they are capable of something. I am heartened by
the increase in visual quality of stainless coffee mugs. When does it
stop being art? Choosing the extreme, excrement smearing, doesn't in my
view help the discussion much.
What about a pencil mark on the wall by a young child. Is there
meaning to this? When a baby does this, is it expressive, can it add
meaning to your life? Can it be a mark you can contemplate? At what age
does the mark suddenly become art. Does it in your eye. Do you define
art by intent?
Art exists in the eye of the viewer as much, probably more than in the
maker. Some objects are clearly easier to distill meaning from.
In most of my life I find that I can live with the distinctions between
categories. This color is red, here it is orange. This dish is sweet,
not sour. But the hard lines between these delineations mostly do not
exist except in our heads. There does not in my mind seem to be a line
at all between art and non if the objects are made by people as a
result of intelligence. Perhaps, well not perhaps, this is a result of
pots, simple plain pots, being excluded from the category "art" by
people who consider them not "expressive" enough to make it to their
exalted definition. Go ahead, figure out where this line is for you,
where art stops and mundane starts, let me know where it is if you wish
Louis
http://www.tamucc.edu/~lkatz/LK
ANTPA
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