Cynthia Freeland but Is It Art? An Introduction to Art Theory Oxford University Press 2001
Simply Is Information technology Art?
Cover illustration: Cross Burn Cow, by William Conger
Published Oxford University Press, February 2001
Text: 220 pages
xxx illustrations, 8 color plates
$16.95
In today'due south art world many foreign, even shocking things qualify as art. In this book, Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy, art theory, and many engrossing examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, coin, museums, sexual activity, and politics, clarifying gimmicky and historical accounts of the nature, function, and interpretation of the arts. Freeland propels united states into the future by surveying art web sites and CD-ROMs, along with cut-border research on the brain's role in perceiving art. This articulate, provocative volume will engage the public and bear witness invaluable to introductory students and teachers in aesthetics and the arts.
Extracts
Selected Extracts from Merely Is Information technology Art?All texts copyright 2001 by Cynthia A. Freeland
Chapter 1. Claret and Beauty
Blood and Ritual
Only does blood in kooky modern (urban, industrial, Get-go World) art hateful what information technology does in "primitive" rituals? Some people advocate a theory of art as ritual: an ordinary object or act acquires symbolic and affective significance through incorporation into a conventionalities system shared by all participants. When the Mayan king shed blood earlier the multitude in Palenque by piercing his own penis and drawing a thin reed through it three times, he exhibited his shamanistic ability to contact the land of the undead. Some artists now seek to recreate a similar sense of fine art every bit ritual. Diamanda Galas fuses operatic wizardry, low-cal shows and glistening blood in her Plague Mass, supposedly to bewitch hurting in the era of AIDS. Hermann Nitsch, the Viennese founder of the Orgies Mystery Theater, promises catharsis through a combination of music, painting, wine-pressing, and formalism pouring of animate being blood and entrails. You can read all almost it on his spider web site at http://world wide web.nitsch.org. Such rituals are not altogether alien from the European tradition: there is a lot of blood in its two primary lineages, the Judaeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman. Jahweh required sacrifices as parts of His covenant with the Hebrews, and Agamemnon, similar Abraham, faced a divine control to slit the throat of his ain child. The blood of Jesus is then sacred that information technology is symbolically drunk to this day past believing Christians equally promising redemption and eternal life. Western art has always reflected these myths and religious stories: Homeric heroes win godly favor by sacrificing animals, and the Roman tragedies of Lucan and Seneca pile upwardly more body parts than Freddie Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Renaissance paintings showed the claret of martyrs with increasing realism; Shakespearean tragedy typically concluded with major characters' deaths. But I doubt that when a performance creative person uses blood now, it has genuinely effective ritual significant. The ways audiences meet it and react are different and they practise non enter in with a shared belief and value organization. Most modern art, in the context of theatre, gallery, or concert hall, lacks the background reinforcement of pervasive community belief that provides meaning in terms of catharsis, sacrifice, or initiation. Far from audiences coming to experience part of a group, sometimes they get shocked and abandon the customs. This happened in Minneapolis when functioning artist Ron Athey, who is HIV-positive, cut the flesh of a fellow performer on phase and so hung blood-soaked paper towels over the audience, creating a panic. If artists merely desire to daze the bourgeoisie, it becomes pretty hard to distinguish the latest kind of art that gets written up in Artforum from a Marilyn Manson functioning that includes Satanic rituals of animal cede on stage. The cynical assessment is that blood in contemporary fine art does non forge meaningful associations, simply promotes entertainment and turn a profit.
Chapter Four. Coin, Markets, Museums
What'south a Poor Artist to Do?
No chapter on art and money can be complete without mention of astronomical prices paid at art auctions, particularly in the boom years of the 1980s. Prices of Van Gogh's works at sales in 1987, in particular, stunned the world: His Irises sold for $53.9 million and Sunflowers for $39.9 1000000. In the same yr, two of Van Gogh's other works went for $20 million and $xiii.75 1000000. The irony was grotesque in low-cal of the artist'due south own poverty and despair over existence unable to sell works during his lifetime. The thought that a work like the Mona Lisa is "priceless" makes it difficult to see and appreciate as art (when one is lucky enough to get a second to stand before it). Tin nosotros always once again see Van Gogh's works as fine art rather than every bit huge dollar signs? Sometimes a museum capitalizes on our absorption with money. A membership solicitation brochure for Commonwealth of australia's National Gallery of Fine art from 1995 featured the controversy over its purchase of Jackson Pollock's painting Blue Poles for $one one thousand thousand (Aus). The brochure'due south cover showed a huge tabloid headline screaming nigh this painting that "Drunks Did Information technology!" Only on the inside of the brochure, the museum (and presumably its members) got the last express joy past pronouncing, "At present the world thinks information technology's worth over $20 million. And it's all yours from $xiv.fifty [i.e., the price of a membership]." Later on succumbing to this entreatment, will the new museum member really be able to look at Blue Poles for its artistic value? Museums are only a part of the current story of the art market place, because wealthy collectors worldwide have more buying power. The advertising executive Charles Saatchi has been accused of manipulating the market for the latest immature and trendy artists through his sudden shifts in purchases or sales. His support of specific travelling exhibitions, like the controversial Sensation showroom of immature British "Britpack" artists (cause of New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani'southward ire in 1999), has also been seen as suspect. Through promoting the exhibition, Saatchi raises the value of works that he owns. How tin an artist escape or confront the art market, with its vagaries of trends and fickle favor?
Chapter Five. Gender, Genius, and Guerrilla Girls
A Feminine Essence?
Some women artists have been recognized, similar Georgia O'Keeffe, who at present has her own museum. But the Guerrilla Girls mutter that this piece of work is not treated on a par with men's: information technology is always downplayed by existence labeled "female." In fact, Alfred Stieglitz, the gallery owner who later became O'Keeffe'south married man. exclaimed when he get-go saw her paintings, "At last! Finally a adult female on canvass!" O'Keeffe ever pooh-poohed the idea that her works were somehow "feminine," only many viewers share Stieglitz's gut reaction that they express a quality of female experience. Flowers are sexual organs, and O'Keeffe's large flower paintings often draw immense and engorged stamens and pistils, delighting in petals' deep folds and costly textures. They practice evoke human genitalia and seem erotic. Judy Chicago, on the other hand, deliberately gives a sexual connotation to bloom imagery on plates of The Dinner Party. She does not only hint at but really does describe female genitalia. Chicago sought a female representation of intimacies of the female trunk to counteract the mostly male person depictions of women in pornography and loftier art. The Dinner Political party celebrated female person bodily experiences by linking visual representations to texts that conveyed women'southward power and achievement rather than passivity and availability. But since 1979 when The Dinner Political party was beginning exhibited, many critics, including feminists, have criticized it as either vulgar or too political, or else equally too "essentialist." Some critics argue that art that focuses so much on beefcake and sexual embodiment ignores important aspects of women's social class, race, historical circumstances, and sexual orientation. The Dinner Party is called simplistic and reductive�equally if the achievements of women it is meant to gloat are cancelled out by the omnipresent and identical vaginal imagery of each place setting. A more recent strategy that other artists use, in contrast to Chicago's reductive and biological approach, is deconstruction: showing that femininity is the artificial product of images, cultural expectations, and engrained behaviors (such as means of dressing, walking, or using makeup).
Chapter Vii. Digitizing and Disseminating
A Democracy of Images
Everyone knows what the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo'south David await like�or exercise nosotros? They are reproduced then often that we may feel nosotros know them even if we have never been to Paris or Florence. Each has countless spoofs--David in boxer shorts or the Mona Lisa with moustache. Art reproductions are ubiquitous. We can now sit in our pajamas while enjoying virtual tours of galleries and museums around the world via the Web and CD-ROM. We can explore genres and painters and zoom in to scrutinize details. The Louvre's web site offers spectacular 360-degree panoramas of artworks like the Venus de Milo. Such tours may become ever more multi-sensory by drawing on Virtual Reality (VR) technology, which includes things like goggles and gloves. Pilots, soldiers, medical students, architects, and phase set designers already use this technology in their training and piece of work. It is not just visual fine art that has been fabricated more widely accessible by new technologies of reproduction. Operas, plays, and ballet performances are regularly broadcast on TV, and more people know the music of Bach and Beethoven from CD'southward or radio than from alive concerts in churches or symphony halls. If I admire the movies of the late Stanley Kubrick, I tin can ain copies in high-resolution DVD (letterbox format of course). Human experiences of art have been significantly inverse in this postmodern historic period of the Internet, videos, CD's, advertising, postcards, and posters. Only for practiced or ill? And how have artists responded? In this final affiliate, I will consider the touch of new communications technologies on art. We will look "dorsum to the time to come" by exploring how fine art's past is digitally disseminated by futuristic technologies across the global hamlet in the new millennium. Three theorists will be our guides: Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Jean Baudrillard. Their attitudes range from enthusiasm to cynicism.
Philosophy and the Arts form outline
Last Updated December x, 2000
Source: https://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/aesth/OUP.html
0 Response to "Cynthia Freeland but Is It Art? An Introduction to Art Theory Oxford University Press 2001"
Post a Comment