The only two universal criteria for 'art' that I've ever seen hold
true are -
1. It must involve modification, even if only moving it from A to B.
2. A substantial number of recognised and influential experts must
agree that it is art.
Nothing else actually works without exception. That's pretty basic.
Nevertheless, it enables a photographer to claim 'art' by extracting
an section of a scene, as the process of selection is an artistic
decision. A lot of the time we just throw a frame around a bit of
reality.
But - Mahler was not writing Musak for lifts.
Van Gogh was not illustrating bicycle advertisements.
No-one ever mistook them for craftsmen - they just thought them to be
poor artists - but still artists.
And don't get me started on state approved art, especially Soviet
Social Realism....
Abstract expressionism - loud farty noises. As Jeffrey Smart
commented, it's for people who never learned to draw.
On the other hand, Dickens 'became literature quite recently - in his
time he was merely a popular writer, churning out soap opera
episodes. . a good craftsman. But neither was he poor and ignored.
There are a thousand examples either way - history is so unreliable.
As to Mr Rockwell (don't know the others) that's still just popular
sentimentalism and nostaligia for a world that never actually
existed. :-)
Stand by for the resurrection of the Blue Lady.
I wrote my Honour's Thesis on an Australian poet and journalist who
drew a distinction between his 'real' poetry and the popular stuff he
wrote for the big distribution weekly that he edited between the
wars. Not that his poems in the paper were poor doggerel - they were
actually very good, sometimes brilliant - but they were written for a
very different and appreciative audience as well as for weekly
income. It's just that his craft sometimes approached the level of art.
Equally I can think of artists who do both 'proper art' and 'popular
illustration' and draw a distinction between the two. A couple of
newspaper political/social cartoonists who are also fine artists, for
instance. In the mid-1800's, the pre-Raphaelite Millais painted
advertisements for soap (Bubbles) but I don't think he regarded it as
part of his serious contribution. On the Rockwell theme, my
illustrious ancestor Sir Luke Fildes was chair of the Royal Academy
and a social realist but his work is regarded as pretty sentimental
these days, no matter how lauded he was in life. See 'The Doctor'
although another was used recently as a cover for the paperback of
'The Conditions of the Working Class in England' - something
appropriate about the poor queueing for admission to a free clinic -
much better and more politically correct - tell Michael Moor
immediately.
So anyway, tell me, is this art? -
http://www.pbase.com/afildes/image/81047385
- and if so, who do I sleep with to get that simple reality
recognised?
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 29/07/2007, at 5:44 PM, Winsor Crosby wrote:
> But can we even tell? Mahler was "discovered" in the 60's after
> being played repeatedly by his influential friend Bruno Walter. To
> contemporaries only a couple of the Bach kids were decent composers,
> certainly not the old organist who fathered them. The music
> Shostakovich has acquired much artisitic merit since the fall of the
> Soviet Union. Norman Rockwell, for goodness sake, is in the process
> of being elevated to the level of art. I started to say canonized. I
> think the transition from illustrator to art has already happened for
> Rockwell Kent and Maxfield Parrish. After trying and failing for many
> years to "get" abstract expressionism, the major art movement of my
> lifetime, it is with a certain self justified relief that it has
> fallen out of favor and now there are even critics who have called it
> merely a marketing scheme to make NYC the economic center of the
> world art market. Art is apparently what influential people say it is
> and if you have a different reaction, well, then you are just a dull
> witted clod.
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