Subject: RE: Daumier-Smith and Empathy
From: Suzanne Morine (suzannem@dimensional.com)
Date: Sat Jul 28 2001 - 15:18:46 GMT
At 06:49 PM 7/27/2001 +0200, ZazieZazie wrote:
>Is art really art when nobody says it's art?
>Suppose you have this writer/sculptor/photographer who does creative work,
>but nobody likes
>it. But he writes, paints etc like crazy and besides his girlfriend/wife
>nobody ever says anything positive
>about it, and she only does it to save the peace/relationship.
>
>Can we still say that it's art? This is an ongoing discussion between me
>and my friends, some of which are a little to optimistic in this respect,
>I guess.
>
>I myself think that if NOBODY says what you do is art, it's not art.
>I know it's difficult to give a 'scientific' definition of art, but i
>would like your opinion about this.
But wouldn't you have to wait until a couple hundred years after you die?
Some artists were not appreciated until after they died.
Were Emily Dickinson's poems not poems until someone else read them?
And if you think your stuff is art, that means *one* person, you, thinks it
is art, so it is art, by your definition above.
And if all of the people die who think something is art, is it no longer
art? If someone is born later who thinks it's art, is it then art again?
Did the cavemen think their drawings were art? Did they have a word for art?
This is the sort of chicken and egg thing that you can get into with art.
Andy Warhol explored some stuff like this. The Campbell's Soup people
created the design for the soup cans. He did things with that. He even
bought a pile of soup cans, at 17 cents a can, signed them, and sold them
for $6 each.
This 1966 article describes that. It's intellectually amusing and confounding.
<http://members.ozemail.com.au/~barberr/gems1.html>
If you or I went out and bought some cans of, say, beans .. and signed
them, would that be art? Would it be comedy? Wouldn't it depend on how we
did it and the audience? And sometimes wouldn't the audience matter a lot
more than us and vice versa? I think all of this is very fluid. Art melds
into culture and vice versa, me thinks.
Suzanne
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
- Emily Dickinson
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