Overview Keith  O'Connor:   My  Writings  on  Art Last update feb  24  2000 .

Topics discussed in this overview:
    definition of art
    Plato's definition of art
    Genetic influence on art
    societies influence on art
    the erotic and art
 
 

This is the overview for a series in five sections that I am developing in unison. Even though they are at the  work in progress stage I have been asked by fellow artists to present them as is. Every few days I work on one or more of them I will often edit what I have previously written.

 
 

I started this definition of art in late 1999.   In February of 2000 I  received an email which lead me to believe that I should more clearly refine my definition of what is art.

After thinking about it for a while I decided to jump into this discussion at the  Victorian period in England, and eventually expand forewords and backwards.  The ideas of the Victorian period  influenced all nations of the western world . It was the period of representational art in which  recognizable images of every day  objects were to be used in an artistic  painting.  This excluded images of the imagination such as  submarines and space ships - images from Jules Vern's imagination.

The problem of  "what is art" has become even more complicated. After all art concerns the organization of  images within a unified field such that beauty is expressed - it should not be a problem to define what that statement means.

That explanation was my original objective, but I have come to realize that art is defined by money and power.

The subjects objects and style that the artist had to use in his or her paintings were imposed by societies power structure, which included religious authorities, legal authorities, political authorities and economic interests, (the art dealers).  For example John Everett Millais, (English 1829 - 1910), painted many nudes including, "Bubbles, Ophelia; The Princes in the Tower, his paintings earned him as much as $50,000 US a year - that was a lot of money in those days.  Much of Millais  early work was influenced by William  Etty, (1787-1849), an English artist who painted the nude almost exclusively.
{View Daumier's comment of 1864= }

The impressionists and expressionists rebelled against the established art dealers and the social order they represented. Their rebellion resulted in a fracturing of the traditional definition of art -  into a different definition of art that is still in conflict with those who follow the  Victorian Period Definition.

The question becomes, how did the need for this rebellion occur? When we look for an origin we find that the history of western art as we know it cannot be separated from the history of the Judeo-Christian church. This is the area we will explore under the section titled "The End of Art",
 
 
 

The following is random  material that has yet to be integrated into the new opening material above.

It is interesting to note that those defenders of art talk about skill in relation to the beauty of the female body. Many of them have web sites that show scans of 19th century nude paintings placed beside a  Picassoesque images of the female nude, and declare by their objective comparison, that the 19th century nude shows skill and craft and that is art,  and that the picassoesque images are ugly junk.

What they don't do is put their 19th century nude beside a 20th century playboy centerfold, because they know deep down that  their definition of art is based upon 19th century soft porn, so they attempt to control the discussion by eliminating from their comparison  a soft porn photograph on the basis that it is not painting but a photograph. I have included a soft porn photograph in my - {View Graphic Comparison = } - to bridge the jump between the two extreems of their illustration.

Now for one of the real questions - should art have an erotic element? - My definition of art is based upon art being a language and like a language you can include the erotic, but it must not dominate the expression, otherwise it is just pornography.
 
 
 
 

I will continue this line of thought

use the bookstore truth analogy.
 
 

In the sexually repressed, (the sexual repression of this period is generally well known), Victorian society a female nude painting,  provided it was titled Venus,  was the only acceptable form of sexual exposure and as a result a well crafted nude painting  would fetch a good price for the dealers.. Men were so sexually immature it's a wonder they figured out how to reproduce. A well known British art critic fainted on his wedding night at the sight of his naked bride. His only exposure to the nude female had been greek sculpture and paintings.

"the art dealers!".  I have a small 19th century water colour, very well done,  but it has a few strategically placed strokes of pearlesque gray used to symbolize the wind.  Those skillfully placed strokes raise the price the dealer will sell it for.  Add a gold gilt frame and he gets a bit more. The dealers adhered to  a standard structure of identifiable skill level characteristics and corresponding prices.

The objective of art schools was to train artists to fill the walls of the growing middle class with a standard style of painting that reflected a hierarchy of prices to match the various status levels within the economic social order.

Human intelligence is directly related to pattern recognition and pattern creation / invention. I equate aesthetics with pattern recognition and art with pattern invention which serves to express mood. Two intellectual conditions must be present for this to occur, the ability to recognize sameness and the ability to recognize difference must be present in the individual. The interaction between sameness and difference allows for the generation of numerous combinations of  similar and  metaphoric mood bearing lines; shapes; colours and textures, etc.

Pattern recognition and invention can take place only at the intellectual level, but is subject to the inerpretation of appearance or structural modes of thinking. Saying that results in linking the witch doctor and the scientist as existing in the same mental universe. Looks like we are building a human behaviour model that is integrated with an artistic process, such that understanding human behaviour and understanding art is a parallel process or the same process viewed from a different direction..

This duality concept has been around for many centuries. Plato put forth  an interesting concept when he referred an alphabet of  pure basic forms, (I am translating into modern concepts), which even nature imitated,  and since the artist immated nature the artist was making a copy of a copy.

This is similar to saying that "since nature can be reduced to a set of geometirc forms and  nature copies those forms over and over. and since the artist immitated nature by reducing nature to these geometric forms then the artist was mearly a copiest.

This argument had dominated artistic thinking for thousands of years, yet it has a very interesting implication.  It does give us an insite into Plato's thinking.  There are two basic approaches to  describing form:  1) consider all visual objects to be composed of flat shapes , and if you faithfully reder these flat shapes you will produce form - this is very similar to Plato's approach - 2)  consider all visual objects to be composed of energy vectors in space, and if you faithfully use your form alphabet to enclse these energy vectors you will produce form.

So it's not what you do,  "it's how you do it", or "it's not what you see but how you see". Conceptualizing in flat shapes or plastic three dimentional shapes are the two basic approaches to art that we have been arguing over for centuries.

I will propose that these arguments have their roots in genetics. In plain english we have individual genetic differences and a result will never achieve universal agreement on one specific idea.

Another interesting set of conflicting ideas is the relationship between the erotic and art. There has been a strong tendency in the western value system to condem the erotic, but we know from my genetic variation theory that we can never universally agree - therefore the group that enjoy's the erotic must make it socially  acceptable and that is done by redefining it as art.  This group's motto is: "a woman's body is beautiful and must be shown as is, (young, sexy, not too heavy, nicely proportioned, clear skin )".  This reflects the tendency for one group to  make laws and punishments that  force  the other group to obey . The old good vers evil cycle is basiclly  freedom vers constraint.  You the "reader" must decide where you fit in the endless genetic struggle.
 
 
 
 

________ it's time for my rest___________

notes to myself for future development: consider aesthetics as the building blocks and art as the resulting mood. That makes drawing colour and mood the three major components of two dimensional art. If  I define colour as a form of articulation then  colour becomes an attribute and the three major components are restated as "drawing, articulation and mood. If I go one step further and define drawing as shape then my three elements become, "shape, articulation and mood. This triplet now has a more generic application. I will have to rethink my ideas in light of this latest idea..

old material I may use in the future

A  friend  said  that I had over the decades formed a unique viewpoint of art and it would be a shame for me to die and let all that research and thinking die with me.

We spent many a lunch time walking for exercise, during which time he was my sounding board, that was the price he paid for a walking partner.  My unique view he referred to brings together all the  visual images that have been produced from the time of our cave man/woman ancestors to the present. I wanted  to be able to say that because of these criteria this design on a pot produced 20,000 years ago is art and and according to the same criteria this abstract painting produced today is also art.

Having spent decades trying to understand art, and having  found thousands of egos clashing over turf definitions that have more to do with  product marketing than with an attempt to understand art. Such statements as: Oil painting is superior to Water colour painting, and within the water colour group only pure water colour painting is acceptable, no opaque white allowed. Acrylic painting is inferior to oil painting and drawing is the most inferior of all.

I have found as much art in a $40.00 water colour as I have seen in a $10,000 oil. I have seen as much art in an Abstract painting as I have seen in a traditional Representational painting. Art is absolutly and catagorically independent of media and style. All differences are promoted by people interested in money and ego.