'But is it art?' by Cynthia Freeland

In the past it was questioned whether photography could be classified as 'Art'. It is in fact classified as 'art' anymore. I mean here I sit at a University devoted to 'art' and I am in a course devoted to photography. Personally I feel the question for our time regarding Photography and Art should be 'Is all photography 'art'?'. I don't intend on answering that just yet as it could get quite deep and I am not prepared for such an undertaking.

In trying to prepare for such a discussion I have read the book that the title for this post came from. The book covered 'art... from many eras and cultures'. It also discussed 'some of the primary theories in the field: ritual theory, theories of taste and beauty, imitation theory, theories that emphasize communication, whether for purposes of expression or cognition.' It was also helpful by 'examining accounts offered by art critics and anthropologists.'

Does it ever answer the question though? Hmm...Well lets just say that it provides some tools of knowledge and theory through a small education that makes our own ability to judge what to classify as art, possible.
Many different points stood out to me as I read through it. I will list those points and the page upon which they can be found below:

• pg32-Aristotle felt that tragedy could educate by appealing to people's minds, feelings, and senses
• pg34-35 distinguished art historian E H Gombrich...described the history of western art as a search for progressively more vivid renderings of reality. Innovations aimed at more perfect semblances. New theories of perspective in the Renaissance, and oil painting with its greater tactility and richness, enabled atists to achieve an increasingly convincing 'copy' of Nature.......but many developments have made the imitation theory of art seem less plausible in the last century. Paniting was prticularly challenged by the realism of an upstart new medium, photography. Since the late nineteenth century, imitation has seemed less and less to be the goal of many genres of art: impressionims, expressiomism, surrealism, abstraction.
• pg38-Aquinas did not defend an account of art as imitation. Aquinas theorized that Beauty was an essential or 'transendental'propterty of god, like Goodness and Unity. Human artworks should emulate and aspire to Gods' marvellous properties. The medievals followed three key prinsiples for beautiful creations like cathedrals: proportion, light, and allegory.
• pg42-Chartres manifested an array of artistic expertise ranging from architectural design to the highly skilled labour of masons, woodcarvers, stonecutters, window painters, and others. individuals of great ability worked here, perhaps receiving high pay and recognition, but ultimately subordinating their efforts to the spiritual purpose of the whole. the result of collaboration at Chartres is an overall harmony serving the three primary Gothic aesthetic principles of porportion, light, and allegory.
• pg43-in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, gardens were recognized as high artistic achievements.....Andre Le Notre was from a family of gardeners called upon by Louis XIV to design a garden grand enough to fit his image as 'The Sun King'. Le Notre spent 50 years of his life (beginning in the 1660s) upon the magnificent gardens of Versailles.
• pg55-Danto wrote a much-discussed paper, 'the art world', about this puzzle. His essay, in turn, prompted pholosopher George Dickie to formulate the 'institutional theory of art', according to which art is 'any artifact...which has had conferred upon it the stuts of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on hehalf of a certain social instituion (the art world)'. this meant that an object like Brillo Boxes was baptized as 'art'if accepted by museum and gallery directors and purchased by art collectors.
• pg63-Can art break down barriers among cultures? John Dewey thought so; he wrote in his 1934 book 'art as experience' that art is the best possible window into another culture. insisting that 'art is a universal language', Dewey urged us to strive to achieve the internal experience of another culture. lll 'external facts'about geography, religion, and history: 'Barriers are dissolved , limiting preudices melt away, when we enter into the spirit of Begro Polynesian art. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the chnage effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude'.
• pg83-84- What holds a community together in periods of loss of their homeland is often their cultural traditions, including religions and rituals along with dance, singing, story-telling, painting, and so on. As people are forced (or choose) to move around teh globe, their descendants emerge with a new, hybridized identity.
• pg 90-Art and money interact in many instituions-in particular museums. Museums preserve, collect, and educate the public and convey standards about art's value and quality-but whose standards,a nd how?
• pg95-Kitsch=something vulgar and popular with great mass appeal (Clement Greenberg famously called it kitsch) examples given were Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post and Thomas Kinkade, the self-designated 'Painter of Light' (Trademarked)
• Avant Garde
• Esoteric
• pg146- Religion, sexuality and politics have affected teh output, imageryand styles of artists over teh centuries, from ancient Athens to medieval Chartres, and on up through the Renaissance and beyond.
• pg147-in order to interpret artworks, we must look beyond gender and sexual prefrence to the broader context that gives any art its meaning. O'Keefe painted many subjects besides flowers; and even her flower images are also 'about' form, light, composition, and abstraction-just as female nudes by Picasso and De Kooning are 'about' cubism or expressionims, as well as libido.
• pg148-two main theories of art, the expression theory and the cognitive theory.
• pg 154- expression theory-art communicates emotions, so is like laughing or screaming. cognitive theory-communicates complex thoughts similar to language
• communicates: it can communicate feelings and emotions, or thoughts and ideas. Interpretation is important because it helpds explain how art does this. Art acquires meaning in part from its context.
• pg 155-leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist (1828-1910), advocated this view in his famous essay, 'What is Art?', Tolstoy believed an artist's chief job is to express and communicate emotions to an audience: 'To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit this feeling that others experience the same feeling-this the activity of art...'
• pg157- Freud believed art expresses unconscious feelings-ones the artist might not even admit to having....Freud saw art as a form of 'sublimation', a gratification that substitutes for the actual satisfaction of our biologically given desires (such as the desire for oral or genital pleasure). Freud explained: '[The artist] is urged on by instinctual needs...' he longs to attain to honour, power, riches, fame, and the love of women; but he lacks the means of achieving these gratifications. So, like any other with an unsatisfied longing, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and all his libido, on to the creation of his wishes in the life of fantasy, from which the way might readily lead to neurosis.'
• pg167-Dewey argued that art can be a source of knowledge just as much as science. (further down the page) Nelson Goodman, a Harvard professor whose important book.  Languages of Art, was published in 1968. he wrote: 'What we know through art is felt in our bones and nerves and muscles as well as grasped by our minds...[A]ll the sensitivity and responsiveness of the organism participates in the invention and interpretation of symbols.'
• pg179-philosopher and social critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) Benjamin celebrated the newer, more democratic forms of art that photography facilitates. he believed that mass reproduction contributed to human emancipation by promoting new modes of critical perception.
• pg181-it is difficult to endorse Benjamin's optimism today. True, movies are very popular, but the contrast between high and mass art has not vanished in cinema, as Benjamin predicted-
• pg189-the new 'global village' with its broad participation will restore the 'primitive'human capacities that have been lost, as we return to something more like an oral culture that is communal and emphasizes sharing, touching, and facial expressions. Electronic media will restore not just right-brain capacities for connection and insight, but also our capacities for integration and imagination: (my own thoughts here- I don't think that is actually happening we aren't encouraged to touch or facial expressions but to upload photos and touch our electronic items. They may help us be creative and explore what can be created into art but it has its own consequences in the ends)
• pg204-205-The Web's 'global village' effects seem ambiguous, too. it draws people together and cameras enhance the sense of contact across cyberspace. yet users remain isolated before their screens. Here we seem to have McLuhan's 'discarnate man', but does he have 'integral awareness'?

After reading this book, I immediately began to wonder how to define what is art. At this moment I would say 'Art is something created to be experienced'. With that thought in my mind, perhaps, 'Art is created from or during experience'.

In the end I am left educated by the author and glad she has taken the time to educate with her text.