International University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo Faculty of Business Administration, Management Studies VA102(Introduction to Visual and Communication Design)

What is art?

Denijal Ikanovi, num. 0910031 December 2012

Today, there are many discussions of how to define art and how to differentiate it from entertainment. As we passing through modern era, different genres and stiles are merging and that makes, differentiating clone from innovator and original, hard job. Most of modern thought share opinion that art is only entertainment and that we cannot judge on or mark an art work. But this argument fails when we put Jenifer Lopez and Ludwig van Beethoven on same music level, which is total nonsense and one that few people would agree with. After research done in area What is Art? people can find many of people that tried talk about art from antiquity to today. If you do so you will probably find more but I selected some of them and you can find the author and quotation in following text. Henry James in his short story The Middle Years : We work in the dark we do what we can we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. Leo Tolstoy, in his essay What Is Art? : Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of mans emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity. Frank Lloyd Wright, writing in 1957, as cited in Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Nature, and the Human Spirit: A Collection of Quotations: Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.

Charles Eames, cited in the fantastic 100 Quotes by Charles Eames: Art resides in the quality of doing; process is not magic. Elbert Hubbard in a 1908 volume of Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers : Art is not a thing it is a way. Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism : Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. Thomas Merton in No Man Is An Island : Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. Francis Ford Coppola in a recent interview : An essential element of any art is risk. If you dont take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasnt been seen before? I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take a risk. Andr Gide in Potique : Art begins with resistance at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor. Friedrich Nietzsche, made famous all over again by Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing: We have our Arts so we wont die of Truth. Michelangelo Pistoletto in Arts Responsibility : Above all, artists must not be only in art galleries or museums they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level. Federico Fellini in a December 1965 piece in The Atlantic, not currently online: All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oysters autobiography. Hugh MacLeod in Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity: Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The Greek philosopher Aristophanes, writing in the 4th century B.C.: Let each man exercise the art he knows.

And, lastly, Maria Popova wrote for the National Endowment for the Arts: This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness. As we can see here are several ways you could go on this, but subjective suspicion is that one will get you better results than the others. I could tell you that art plays a large part in making our lives infinitely rich. Imagine, just for a minute, a world without art. Art stimulates different parts of our brains to make us laugh or incite us to resistance, with a whole specter of emotions in between. Art gives us a way to be creative and express ourselves. For some people, art is the entire reason they get out of bed in the morning. On the other hand, art is such a large part of everyone everyday lives. Art can be functional and aesthetically pleasing our mind and eyes. So if you look around you can find many art. Art is your shoes, art is your desk, art is most of the thing surrounding us that someone designed. Some prefer some different artwork on another. In order to clear out ability of differentiating quality of art work, at first place we must define what art really means. Basically we can say that we have two different kind of art, one that describes and one abstract or one that is not describing. Under descriptive art we consider poetry that can make pictures and is cornerstone on inter-mind which is very similar as dreaming process. When we read literature or examine picture, we used to make some subjective photos inside our minds and by time produce ideas that are in context of our past lives. Architecture is often included as one of the visual arts; however, like the decorative arts, it involves the creation of objects where the practical considerations of use are essentialin a way that they are usually not for a painting, for example. Music, theatre, film, dance, and other performing arts, as well as literature, and other media such as interactive media are included in a broader definition of a the arts. Until the 17th century, art referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences, but in modern usage the fine arts, where aesthetic considerations are paramount, are distinguished from acquired skills in general, and the decorative or applied arts. On the other hand music is completely different kind of art which is indeed total abstract. Even it can initiate our mind to produce pictures inside, in a music which is called program music , like Beethovens Sixth symphony Pastoral, music doesnt depend about descriptive processes related to other kinds of art. Music deals with senses and fillings and is aimed to get our minds through logical connected ideas. Indeed, still understanding these differences does not answer our question what is art? and how to define it. What we can conclude from here is that this view of art is way different than one modern mentioned before that says that art is an illusion. We came to point where we concluded that music is biggest abstract of all art and that art is only language that implies existence of beings. Now we can understand what is difference between Jenifer Lopez and Beethoven. In popular music, including rock, jazz, blues, techno, metal and etc. melodies are just effects on top of rhythmic level. Reason why we dont experience some travel during listening Jenifer, is one that her music do not possess any indirect narative cornerstone. You can see while reading titles of today pop songs that it is all about creating estetics on art cornerstone. Overlaping of provided feelings with dress code, lyrics, tempo and chorus creates all this. Life does not reward the will expressed in pop music; pacifism, naive love, equality and materialism. Instead, the classical music celebrates

the core of life itself; inequality, tragedy and joy, war, conflict and struggle, but most importantly, it is an expression of the poetry and beauty of organic existence. When at its peak, it doesn't even require a fictional motive, but becomes a will of itself, affirming why art has always existed and why it will continue to exist for as long as human beings roam on this earth. But what exactly does this mean? What does it mean to capture the very essence of something in order to evoke a direct emotiona response? The answer to these questions, it turns out, provides the key to understanding what art really is. According to Tolstoy, art must create a specific emotional link between artist and audience, one that "affects" the viewer. Thus, real art requires the capacity to unite people via communication. Indeed, as we shall see, what the artist tries to do is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object. Why art? Why not entertainment, since that seems to be more "fun"? The answer is simple; art helps us to understand how life operates, but its nature is not entirely Apollonian, because if we wanted to merely calculate ideas in life, we could turn to science or religion. Art is special because it justifies life and its own existence, as an aesthetic phenomenon. We celebrate art because no other human creation is able to capture the poetic essence of life. This poetic side to our existence is not an illusion or a fictional creation, but something buried within life. One could say it's magic, lacking better words for it. Science cannot calculate its beauty, religion only understands it in terms of myths, and philosophy can only describe its design.

References

Barlow, H.B. (1986), Why have multiple cortical areas?, Vision Research, 26 (1), pp. 8190. Goguen, J.A. (1999), Editorial Introduction, What is art, 6 (67), pp. 28 Ramachandran, V.S. and Hirstein, W. (1999), The science of art, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 (67), pp. 58 http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/alexis/art/croatian-language.html http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/22/what-is-art