I'm studying for my Humanities final, and there are several paintings and sculptures whose titles and artists I'm supposed to know that I would readily identify as art. (I'd list a few examples, but it's hard to pick the most notable ones, and I'm short on time.) Then, there are paintings and sculptures that I would hesitate to describe as art. Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm comes to mind. There is no "autumn" or "rhythm" in this piece, just black and white pain haphazardly splattered onto a beige canvas. Is that "art"? Even less deserving of the title of "art" is Marcel Duchamp's Bottle Rack, which is literally just a rack for drying glass bottles. Duchamp bought it at a department store and called it art, having made no modifications to it at all.
That, in my opinion, is not art. However, my opinion isn't the only one that matters. They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe the same is true of art. Maybe whether something is art or not depends entirely on the person looking at it. If you look at a painting or an object, and you see artistic meaning and value in it, then, to you, it's art. But my untrained eye does not see much, if any artistic value in Autumn Rhythm or Bottle Rack, so, to me, they're not art.
1 comment:
Of course I can see beauty in something we might buy at the store and in a sense that's art. But not art to put in a museum unless it's a museum of useful art or art in daily life. And displaying it does not make you the artist, IMHO. We should learn to see art and beauty all around us in the simple daily things. Good question: what IS art?
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