Aristotle Claimed All Art Is ââ“ or Should Be Mimetic Representingimitating Life This Is Called
What is art? The question that has been troubling the humanity for centuries. The nature of art has been described by philosopher Richard Wollheim equally 'one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of homo culture'. The definition of art is open up, subjective and debatable. Throughout the history of fine art, artists themselves have been pushing the boundaries of each definition and challenging our preconceptions. As the concept of art has been irresolute through centuries, its purpose has been divers as to represent reality, communicate emotions or ideas, create a sense of dazzler, explore the nature of perception, explore formal elements for their ain sake, or simply being nonexistent. The role of art has been changing over time, acquiring more of an artful component hither and a socio-educational function there. There is no understanding between philosophers, art historians and artists, and thus, we are left with so many definitions.
Since the ascension of the avant-garde, Western tradition has been evolving to the point where anything tin be presented every bit an art object, and where the role of the creative person is subject to multiple interpretations. In 1981, the German-born American art historian Peter Selz wrote: 'If one general statement can be made about the art of our times, information technology is that one by one the old criteria of what a work of art ought to be take been discarded in favor of a dynamic approach in which everything is possible'.
Fine art As Mimesis
The idea of fine art equally an imitation, that dominated throughout centuries of art history, dates back to ancient Greece. Plato didn't wait besides fondly on art. Regarding all art forms as instances of 'mimesis' or simulated, he criticized them for failing to depict the eternal ideal realities that he referred to as 'forms' or 'ideas'. Since life itself was simply a mere and poor copy of perfect platonic forms, the fine art as a copy of a copy was only a third removal from the reality and truth. Similarly, Aristotle traces art back to the love of imitation and recognizing likenesses which characterizes humans. But for him, fine art was not mere copying. As a realization in the external grade of a true idea, fine art idealizes nature and completes its faults seeking to grasp the universal blazon in the individual phenomenon. 'The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance', Aristotle wrote.The theory of art as an imitation of dazzler or nature was persistent throughout the history of art. In Lives of the Painters Renaissance painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote 'painting is but the faux of all the living things of nature with their colors and designs just as they are in nature'. It wasn't until the beginning of the 19th century and the rise of Romanticism that this idea started to fade abroad and much greater emphasis was placed on the expression of the artist's emotions.
Fine art Equally a Form of Expression
Born out of Romanticism, the expression theory of art defined it every bit the means of portraying the unique and individual emotions of artists. Tolstoy's definition of art in his piece What Is Art? was very much out of this mould: 'Art is a homo activity, consisting in this, that one person consciously, by sure external signs, conveys to others feelings he has experienced, and other people are affected by these feelings and live them over in themselves'. Argued that expression theory restricts artists to the expression of feelings and emotions, later theorists emphasized that art tin express not simply feelings and emotion but likewise ideas. In 'Sentences of Conceptual Art' in Art and Its Significance, American creative person Sol Le Witt stated: ' Ideas alone can be works of art….All ideas need not be made physical.…A work of art may exist understood every bit a conductor from the creative person's mind to the viewer's. But information technology may never reach the viewer, or it may never get out the creative person's mind'.
Every bit a way of expressing emotions and ideas, art is also a powerful means of communication. Making an affect on the sensory perceptions of others, a piece of work of art should arguably communicate creative person's emotions or feeling. Centuries before the expression theory, Leonardo da Vinci stated that 'fine art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all generations of the world'. In the above-mentioned piece, Tolstoy wrote: 'To evoke in oneself a feeling 1 has experienced, and…and so, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling—this is the activity of art'.
Art and The Truth
Thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger have interpreted art as the means past which a community develops for itself a medium for self-expression and interpretation. For Heidegger, art either manifests, articulates or reconfigures the manner of a civilisation from within the world of that culture. In this sense, art is capable of revealing someone else'southward world and producing a shared understanding. Much before Heidegger, Hegel thought art expresses the spirit of item cultures, also as that of individual artists and the general human spirit. Putting an emphasis on the historical development of ideas and of consciousness, he saw an creative expression as a kind of a climax of the history of the homo spirit that reveals the truth in an intuitive fashion.
Fine art often revolves around the search for truth and meaning in one's life. Only can a work of art produce the truth? While Plato idea it cannot, Hegel and some other thinkers thought differently. The notion of truth in art is non a matter of accurate representation in an empirical way, but art tin limited a deeper sense of reality and convey sure knowledge. In Fire and Ice: The Art and Thoughts of Robert Frost , the American poet Robert Frost wrote: ' To me the thing that art does for life is to clean information technology – to strip it to form'. Similarly, Pablo Picasso thought that 'art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at to the lowest degree the truth that is given us to understand'. Since artists and their audience share the material world in which they live, art tin can contribute to the change of that world and the general sensibilities and attitudes. As Paul Klee wrote in The Inwards Vision, 'art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible'.
Fine art Shaping The Earth
Speaking in Marxist terms, art tin be understood as a part of the superstructure or every bit part of the cloth basis. Or in other words, it tin can be understood as an credo or equally engineering science. Art as an ideology contributes to the reproduction of the electric current social conditions, while the art in the material basis seeks to change them. Encouraging individuals to think exterior the limits to which their thoughts are regulated by the systems of ability, art serves to eradicate the 'demystification' present in backer society. The writings of Marx and Engels on art were both limited and significant, but other Marxist theorists continued to develop the Marxist theory of art. For Adorno, politically engaged art is a fractional cosmetic to the bankrupt aestheticism of the majority of mainstream art. Every bit he wrote, 'all art is an uncommitted crime', meaning that art challenges the status quo by its very nature and engages with an already existing ideology and dominant discourse. Thus, art should be critical and should interrogate the earth, rather than seek to explain it, or as Brecht wrote: 'Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it'.
So, What Is Art?
Whatever fine art is, it is inherent to human existence. Dostoevsky wrote: 'Art is equally much a demand for humanity equally eating and drinking. The need for beauty and for creations that embody it is inseparable from humanity and without it man perhaps might not want to live on earth. Human being thirsts for beauty, finds and accepts beauty without whatsoever conditions but just as it is, simply considering it is beauty; and he bows down before it with reverence without asking what use information technology is and what one can purchase with it'. For Nietzsche, 'art is essentially the affidavit, the blessing, and the deification of existence'. Art is a ways of coping with the earth we live in, our own existence and making sense of information technology all. American novelist Saul Blare wrote that 'fine art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos'. On the other mitt, for Oscar Wilde, 'art is the most intense way of individualism that the earth has known'. Art is too an attempt at immortality, or equally French novelist Andre Malraux wrote, 'art is a defection, a protest confronting extinction'. Art is all those things and so many others. Transcending a solipsistic view of life, art has the power to relate to the world and each other with more than integrity, more curiosity, more than wholeheartedness. And by doing so, it makes our lives infinitely rich.
Source: https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/what-is-art