Introduction: Art and Aesthetics
Summary
WHAT IS ART?
In his 1890 poem, Conundrum of the Workshops, Rudyard Kipling writes,
When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, “It's pretty, but is it Art?”
As Kipling duly suggests, the questions surrounding our definition and understanding of the nature and purpose of “Art” are ancient ones:
What is it about certain man-made objects that make them beautiful, arresting, soothing, provocative, or enlightening?
Why are some objects worthy of the label “Art,” while others are somehow disqualified from that categorization?
How do objects created for specifically utilitarian purposes (e.g., a bridge, an office tower, a clay pitcher, etc.) transcend their practical functions and enter the realm of Art? What inherent properties or qualities must be present in a man-made object to justify that classification?
What is the criteria that we employ when making these types of determinations? And who defines and applies that criteria?
What is Art's purpose? To simply beautify our surroundings? To elicit an emotional response? To provoke thought or cerebral reactions? To make a rhetorical point or pose a rhetorical question? To compel some sort of social, political, and/ or spiritual change? To allow for certain types of communication between human beings that cannot be achieved otherwise? Or to merely provide a welcome and relaxing diversion?
In attempts to answer these and related questions, we in the modern era are often ruled by Romantic notions of individual subjectivity, which insists that absolute criteria be displaced by a fluid relativism, leading to the slippery notion that “beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.”
But if beauty lies merely in the eye of the beholder, does it then follow that there are no native qualities or innate characteristics in the object itself that render it beautiful, regardless of our own individual gazes? Is there no such thing as a fixed set of definable standards by which we evaluate an object's worth? If not, does it then follow that Art means whatever anybody wants it to mean? Wouldn't that make it mean nothing?
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- Information
- Aesthetics and the Cinematic NarrativeAn Introduction, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2019