CITE What is art?
the definition of art and artist?
No two definitions are the same.
Conception is the key to art.
A really well made button hole is the only link between art and nature.
Jacques Ellul observes When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and suppresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.
PUPLIC RELATIONS IS ABOUT ONE THING "PROPAGANDA" AND PROPAGANDA IS ADVERTSING.
What's in fashion isn't about culture, fashion is about one thing - Advertising.
Motivating the culture to buy what they don't want or need is about one thing "PUBLIC
RELATIONS".
Fraud's American nephew Edward Bernays was the first to use psychological techniques in public relations. The words of Paul Mazur, a leading Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers, are cited: "We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs".
Director Doug Pray reveals the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising minds of our time. From the "creative revolution" of the 1960s, artists and writers have brought a surprisingly rebellious spirit to their work in an industry known for pandering and manipulation.
Lee Clow
George Lois
Import ideas from conceptual art into the heart of politics Power Strategy -- just keep them all confused Adam Curtis
Modern #art was #CIA #'weapon' (1995) unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning got used in a cultural Cold War
1955 NY Times US has sonic secret weapon - JAZZ America's secret weapon is a a blue note in a minor key" or better "European approach to jazz as seen by Americans".
The DoD takes an extremely active part in culture-shaping. anytime you see US military hardware or personnel in a film or TV show, it has to be run by the DoD PR for review and editing to promote an 'acceptable' view of the military -- even for things as trivial as American Idol. Americans by and large absorb what is within the bounds of acceptable political thought from mass media. What you don't see are the hands behind the scenes sculpting our culture.
America's Secret Weapon Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of #Arts and
Letters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM
TALENT
Difficult personalities go with the territory. And when it comes to art, talent isis unique in
a
class by itself - original - one of a kind. You can't control them. There's very little talent out there.
And
the more you try to tell it what to do and how to act the more you're going to alienate it.
Talent is king only if it's bigger than the enterprise. When the execs start believing
they're bigger than the talent, you know you're in trouble. Controversy fades, if you listen to your
critics,
you're toast. The world runs on talent. And executives hate this. Talent is mercurial, doesn't heed
deadlines
and other corporate mores. But talent is the fuel of success. The most important person is the one who finds
and signs the talent, everybody else is superfluous, remember that.
Distribution is king. If you can't see or hear it, it doesn't exist. But distribution without talent is a
complete failure. Talent first, never forget it.
You can go your own way, but you might not be as successful. Meanwhile, the establishment you worked at just
doesn't get it, and you're frustrated. So we lionize the innovators.
Never give up your audience, it's all you have.
Why artists create. They have a need to COMMUNICATE!
~
" We think these artists are two-dimensional. We want them to open wounds and reveal all, but we want
to
treat them like cardboard cut-outs, without feelings, without dimensions. Actually, I'll posit the greater
the
artist, the looser their grip on reality. There's no more talented artist than Joni Mitchell, but conversation with her is extremely difficult. It's
hard
to get to the meat of the matter for Joni challenging and interrupting your premise, however irrelevant. Not
that I speak with Joni all the time. But I've had a few interactions.
Not that she's crazy, but I will say she's difficult. Then again, she made the best self-confessional music
of
all time. Furthermore, she can play and sing and write. Do you think a normal person can do this?
OF COURSE NOT!
A normal person plays it close to the vest, is manipulative, whereas an artist is out there completely,
warts
and all. Artists need representation because they can't fathom the manipulation of business, they need
protection."
True artists are not like us. They lack discipline. Order. ARTISTS never really belong. They were
off-kilter. Thin-skinned. Following an inner art they weren't fully sure they possessed. Poseurs are
boasters, confident, all-knowing. Legends are unsure.
The truth is the greats are doomed. Even if they're alive, they're oftentimes broke and unhappy. But
without them, without their beacon, life would not be worth living.
Artistic Requirements
by Bob Lefsetz
TRUTH
In the land of the phony it's your responsibility to speak from the heart in an unfiltered way. If
you're second-guessing the audience, you're already in trouble. Put the beer company in your song and you've
lost credibility, and credibility is key to believability and longevity. It's your duty to reach down into
the
hearts of the audience and resonate with their true feelings.
POINT OF VIEW
Nobody likes a wuss, nobody likes namby-pamby. If you're not offending someone, you're not doing it right.
Likes are for Facebook, not art. Art has an edge. Art makes people uncomfortable. It makes people think. It
makes people feel. If you rub off all the rough points no one will talk about you, no one will care about
your
art, and now, more than ever, the road to success is paved with discussion.
PRACTICE
We can debate all day long whether Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule is accurate. All I can say is
practice
gives you a facility, an ability to be your best self. I'm a great skier, but only after being on the hill
thirty days straight do I have the confidence and ability to ski between the rocks. Sure, amateurs can do
it,
but one false move and they're dead, literally. The practice gives you the recovery gene, you're able to
accommodate mistakes instinctively. I admire John Oliver because he does his act so well, but the truth is
it
was honed on the "Daily Show." You're not a great performer the first time you hit the stage. You
learn by experience. What works with the audience and yourself. So you can buy a short cut, but then your
life
will be full of short cuts. You can sing the songs of hitmakers, but once you're no longer flavor of the
month, when you're no longer privy to the best material, what are you going to do then? If you're a writer
yourself, you can survive. And a great writer has a facility with words the same way I can ski between the
rocks, it's got to be a reflex gene.
CREATE
An artist creates. Constantly. That's their job. The same way a baseball player plays 162 games a season.
You've got to keep doing it, you've got to love it. If you'd rather social network, be a businessman.
IS NOT SUBJECT TO INTIMIDATION
People will try to change you, say they're gonna kill your career and other hogwash. Don't bend. That does
not
mean you're always right, but if your inner tuning fork says you are, stand up for your viewpoint. Business
is
about manipulation, art is unselfconscious, it emanates from deep inside. Your best art will be made when
you're not even trying, when you're channeling the gods.
KNOWS THE LANDSCAPE
Art is all about influence. The Beatles were influenced by "Pet Sounds." Be aware of the
landscape,
study the history, not so you can testify like an expert but so you can establish a jumping off point, so
you
can see you were not the only one who was confronted with this issue.
PUTS ART OVER MONEY
Sure, everybody wants to get paid. But if it's your primary desire, you're not an artist. First and foremost
an artist wants to create and have his art experienced by as large an audience as possible. If you're
concerned about money, go into tech, where if it doesn't pay, it doesn't play.
IS SINGULAR
Unlike anything else. In the heyday of classic rock, Jethro Tull didn't sound like anything else, and when
you
first saw Alice Cooper your draw dropped. Being me-too is not being an artist. An artist test limits,
challenges the audience's preconceptions. If you're operating behind the audience, or are at the same place
they are, you're stagnant, you're not being an artist.
LEADS DOESN'T FOLLOW
If you're cocksure, always confident you're on the right path, you're not an artist. An artist is an
explorer.
And sometimes he finds himself atop a snowy mountain in the wrong place without a compass.
HAS TO COME UP WITH HIS/HER OWN ANSWERS
If you're looking to others you're ceding your artistry. You must know what you want. Others' ideas can
stimulate you, but they can't provide for you, they can't give you your starting point.
HAS TO SAY NO
A businessman says yes and then lies in the future to try and get what he wants. An artist is pure, an
artist
won't do that which is uncomfortable, the business and the audience bend to the artist, not vice versa.
FIGHTS BACK
Apologize if you're wrong, but defend yourself if you're not. Just because someone is criticizing you, that
does not mean they're right.
HAS A BACKBONE
It's tough to be an artist, especially today, when there are so many diversions and the only thing anybody
talks about is money. But the truth is money pales in comparison to art. Art slays money. And usually
generates a pile of it anyway. Being an artist is a sentence, it's painful, and if you don't feel this
you're
not one.
ART IS POWER
Only superseded by love.
What music does best, isn't about telling a story, but to instigate your own, set your mind free to remember, to think, to envelop yourself in this thing we call life.
We all have warts. And an artist is one who reflects them back upon ourselves, with insight.
Your work isn't art until somebody rich comes along and buys it
A lot of people play music for the wrong reasons. I never played to get women, though I
had my share. I didn't do it for the money, though it pays the bills. I realized early on that I could
create something beautiful that would build love within the people who came out to hear it. Music is the
best medicine in the world, man.
CREATIVITY:
They're loners, who want in.
And the only entrance ticket they've got is their art. They just believe if they do good enough work,
the
door will open, they'll be accepted, they'll find love and happiness. The motivation is different
today. Art is secondary to stardom.
Are you concerned about the issues between maintaining control of one's own work and having access to the creative works of others? Is it possible to imagine a middle ground that can sustain and accommodate both proprietary and public domain needs? What new business models, legal schemes or public policies are needed to achieve such a vision?
Copyright vs Public Domain
What is art?
Duchamp said he made the first one, the bicycle wheel, just because it was fun to spin the wheel around.
But
when you exhibit it, when you put it into an attention field called "art," it becomes a catalyst.
You must look at it differently. Yes, we should indeed pay more attention to the utilitarian world, savor
its
beauty as beauty. But when you find yourself gazing at it worshipfully, Duchamp turns around and says,
"It's just a bicycle wheel, you silly jerk." The final result is to make us oscillate back and
forth between the physical world, stuff, and how we think about stuff. It makes us look at our own patterns
of
attention and the varieties of "seriousness" we construct atop them.
That oscillation constitutes a serious lesson about seriousness. But it does not constitute great art, if we
think of art as composed of stuff shaped into beauty, as forming part of a goods economy. In this industrial
framework, Duchamp is the charlatan some have taken him for. But if you are willing to put him into an
attention economy rather than a goods economy, let him work in attention, not in stuff, then things look
different. Duchamp, as few before him, knew how to catalyze human attention in the most economical way
possible. The disproportion between his oeuvre, the physical stuff he left behind, and his reputation can be
explained in no other way. If we are looking for economists of attention, he provides a good place to start,
an excellent lesson in efficiency. Musicians Give away product / music to purchase attention. In an
information economy, the real scarce commodity will always be human attention and that attracting that
attention will be the necessary precondition of social change. And the real source of wealth.
Warhol the commercial artist, Warhol the painter, Warhol the filmmaker, Warhol the writer, Warhol the
collector, Warhol the philosopher, and, superlatively and climactically, Warhol the celebrity: all these
roles
float on a sea of commentary, nowadays mostly hagiographical. Let's try, as a perspective by
incongruity,
to describe Andy Warhol as an economist, an economist of attention. And perhaps the perspective would not in
fact seem so incongruous to him. Here's what he said about the relation of art to business:
"Business
art is the step that comes after Art.
- I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. . . .
- Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art . . .
- making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."
It was his life's work to illustrate the paradoxical relationship of stuff and attention. Let's summarize the rules of attention-economy art as Andy practiced them:
- *Build attention traps. Create value by manipulating the ruling attention structures. Judo, not brute force, gets the best results. Duchamp did this for a joke. Do it for a business.
- *Understand the logic of the centripetal gaze and how to profit from it.
- Draw your inspiration from your audience not your muse. And keep in touch with that audience. The customer is always right. No Olympian artistic ego need apply.
- Turn the "masterpiece psychology" of conventional art upside down:
* Mass production not skilled handwork
* Mass audience not connoisseurship
* Trendiness not timelessness
* Repetition not rarity - Objects do matter.
- Don't leave the world of stuff behind while you float off in cyberspace.
- Conceptual art gets you nowhere.
- Create stuff you can sell.
- Live in the present. That's where the value is added. Don't build your house in eternity. "
My work has no future at all. I know that. A few years. Of course my things will mean nothing."
Gil Scott Heron - What is a Poet
WHAT IS ART?
What is art? We asked a cross-section of people from within the arts world, as well as the wider community, to define art in one sentence. Some came up with a quick quip, others relied on extensive punctuation to offer a more descriptive response. No two definitions were the same.
,
- "For success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential."
-The spirit of the dreaming.
- Art is an expression of our culture and the time in which we live - and `great'
art
has the potential to transcend cultural boundaries.
- Art is anything that requires a maker; it cannot make itself - this is Aristotle's
definition in The Nicomachian Ethics, and I think it to be the best.
- Art is the child of imagination and gives life.
- I asked our dog Ruby and she didn't know either ...
- Art may be a painting, sculpture, photograph, symphony, dance or any other creative
endeavor that incorporates intellectual rigor, structural excellence, a strong element of beauty and a
core
of spirituality as well as the capacity to transport the audience to a higher level of being.
- Having an itch you can't scratch.
- Art in its broadest sense - is the compulsion to give creative expression and
definition
to life (and itself), and to go beyond definition - inscribed by culture and aesthetics; aching for
response; illusory and defiant of illusion; liberated by intellect, wit and chance; refined by
love.
- Art is something created to affect your feelings and your thoughts - it moves you,
excites you, challenges you, inspires you.
- We need art because it turns the shit and chaos of our lives, through a process of
sheer
alchemy, into beauty, wonder, joy.
- Art is a product of imaginative minds.
- Art has the facility to actually enrich and empower your life and make you
happy.
- Art consciously transforms reality and creates a philosophical and emotional exchange
between the artist and the viewer.
- Art is the tangible result of our human drive to express inner experience using
rhythmic, sensuous or composed effects.
- Life experience distilled through creative expression.
- The whole endeavor of art is about the (aesthetically) beautiful.
Kate Cherry, associate director, Melbourne Theatre Company
- Art is indefinable.
- Looking for something you can't find.
- Art is the greatest gift of God, one that transcends human suffering and brings joy
and
enlightenment to both creator and its audience.
- Art is the distillation or the exaggeration of life.
- Art is anything defined as such, however good art is about the understanding of
distinguishing between things, curiosity and an idea or two.
- A creative expression of oneself done in one's choice of medium.
- Art can take many forms - visual, musical, performing but for me a work of art is
something created by the human mind that has the capacity to move me - it has a real aesthetic, emotional
and spiritual element
- Art is many different and stimulating things - today art is a wellcut and well
occupied
pair of trousers.
- Art is never a sentence; it is an improbable miracle soaring above the banality of
everyday existence.
- Art is the response of the human mind, heart and spirit to the world, people and ideas
around us; it is an expression of our longing for the transcendent, and a participation in the creativity
of
the creator God, the living Spirit.
- Art is the human expression of the divine beauty and harmony, which resonates in the
created world around us.
- It's friends around you, as Ginger (Riley) says, if you look after it, it will
look
after you.
- Art is constituted by the act of choice.
- Art only becomes art on those rare occasions when both the mind and the senses are
simultaneously stimulated.
- Art offers to me a wide range of visual enjoyment and mental stimulation; depending on
your taste you are attracted to certain types of art instantly, others you will stop at and wonder what it
is all about - this leads to questions and answers which turn your mind to a larger spectrum of
appreciation, and last but not least, it has helped me pay the bills!
Margaret Anderson, president, Voluntary Guides, National Gallery of
Victoria
- Art for me is living and feeling, responding to a moment - a glance, and something
much
deeper and more difficult to define but very satisfying.
- Art is the creative expression of thoughts, ideas or emotions, which stimulates the
senses or the imagination of the beholder.
- For me the most appropriate definition is as stated in the 1955 edition of The Little
Oxford Dictionary: "See `Be'."
- Largely misunderstood; not given the recognition it deserves.
- Art is an integral part of our lives and communicates at all levels ... it is a medium
for transmitting ideas ... from the academic and often esoteric analysis of historical works held in the
formal environment of the art gallery, to the everyday visual enjoyment of the graphics on the cover of
the
latest CD or the humble cereal box.
- Impossible to say.
- Art happens and you can't plan it.
- Art is truth and beauty in a jolt of lightning.
Lisa Cameron, senior lecturer, department of economics, University of
Melbourne
- Art can be beauty for beauty's sake - it needn't reflect rationality or logic,
and so provides immense relief for someone whose working life is dominated by these concrete
precepts.
- Here goes: art is the conjunction of image and idea, the meeting place between
imagination and creativity, it seeks to amplify (and destabilise) perception; habitually falling outside
of
rational order, and conceiving of the future whilst playing with the past.
- Art is stimulation of the senses by somebody else's creativity.
- The function of the artist is to describe the world from their own personal point of
view, and when you put enough artists' personal points of view together you start to get a sense of
the
fabric of the time and place it was made, and style and fashion has very little to do with it.
- Art is only finally realised as the maturation of a contract between the maker and the
recipient through which the dreams of the former find their resolution in the hope/despair of the
later.
- Art is the rubric of human consciousness.
- Art is the most dependable way of giving meaning to life.
- Art evokes a response that takes me away from the humdrum of what I am doing at the
time, and lets me see from a new perspective.
- I think art is the opposite of war.
- A refined craft elevated by vision or inspiration.
- For as long as we've been able to hoot, toot, tap bones and make effigies out of
bits of clay and other inchoate stuff, art has been integral to our species; the imaginative end of our
need
to conceptualise.
- Art is fashion 100 years too late.
Indiana University Cinema film holdings include Alfred Kinsey's sexually explicit films and videos.
What is Art?
Speaking of Opium: Ownership and (Settler) Colonial Dispossession
JAY HAMMOND Columbia University © (2011) ISSN 1838-‐0743 103
http://ojs.lib.swin.edu.au/index.php/settlercolonialstudies/article/view/271/249
Borrowing the idea of the 'European Art/Culture system' from historian James Clifford, Coombe
reviews
the ways in which the terms 'art' and 'culture' shifted their meanings as part of the larger
historical project of colonialism, global capitalism and the distribution liberal ideas of autonomy and
creative expression.9 Before this shift, art referred primarily to what we would today understand to be
craft.
A highly specialised skill in a specific industry such as that of the cobbler or luthier fell under the idea
of art, while culture referred to an organic growth such as a yogurt culture. Art with a capital A develops
in
the nineteenth century as the product of the expressive faculties of an autonomous self, often referred to
as
a 'genius'. Similarly, culture as an organic growth morphs into Culture (capital C) - which refers
to
the progress of civilisation. Raymond Williams has categorised the nineteenth century notion of Culture into
three categories; Culture as 'a process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development'
Culture
as 'a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group or humanity' and Culture as
'the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity'.10
Hammond, 'Speaking of Opium'. 108
Coombe discusses Art (capital A) as well as Williams' first and third concepts of Culture under the
rubric
of what she terms 'possessive individualism'. More than anything else, the European Art/Culture
system
develops as a method of asserting ownership over a wide variety of artifacts, products of creative
expression
as well as natural resources (such as opium). Art is no longer the product of years of the development of a
craft, but an expression of autonomy and individuality that works to assert ownership over that expression.
Culture - in Williams' first and third senses, development of the self and/or works and practices of
intellect - is also a technology of ownership that is legitimated through colonial notions of the unceasing
progress of civilisation. This unceasing progress - which can also be understood as the logic of development
-
is to be mirrored through a similar progression of the self and its intellectual and artistic expressions.
Here we have the fusing of the aforementioned Lockean notions of property with Kantian notions of the
'private' self that exists in contrast to, but as a necessary part of, public life. Liberal autonomy
and private property are necessary components of Art as an expression of creative genius and Culture as a
sign
of the progress of civilisation and the self.