What is Art .... ?
INTRODUCTION
ART has not always been what we think it is today. An object regarded as Art today may not have been perceived as such when it was first made, nor was the person who made it necessarily regarded as an artist. Both the notion of "art" and the idea of the "artist" are relatively modern terms.
Many of the objects we identify as art today -- Greek painted pottery, medieval manuscript illuminations, and so on -- were made in times and places when people had no concept of "art" as we understand the term. These objects may have been appreciated in various ways and often admired, but not as "art" in the current sense.
ART lacks a satisfactory definition. It is easier to describe it as the way something is done -- "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others" rather than what it is
During the Renaissance, the word Art emerges as a collective term encompassing Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, a grouping given currency by the Italian artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century. Subsequently, this grouping was expanded to include Music and Poetry, which became known in the 18th century as the 'Fine Arts'. These five Arts have formed an irreducible nucleus from which have been generally excluded the 'decorative arts' and 'crafts', such as as pottery, weaving, metalworking, and furniture making, all of which have utility as an end.
However, how did Art become distinguished from the decorative arts and crafts? How and why is an artist different from a craftsperson?
In the Ancient World and middle Ages, the word we would translate as 'art' today was applied to any activity governed by rules. Painting and sculpture were included among a number of human activities, such as shoemaking and weaving, which today we would call crafts.
During the Renaissance, there emerged a more exalted perception of art, and a concomitant rise in the social status of the artist. The painter and the sculptor were now seen to be subject to inspiration and their activities equated with those of the poet and the musician.
in the latter half of the 16th century the first academies of art were founded, first in Italy, then in France, and later elsewhere. Academies took on the task of educating the artist through a course of instruction that included such subjects as geometry and anatomy. Out of the academies emerged the term "Fine Arts" which held to a very narrow definition of what constituted art.
The institutionalizing of art in the academies eventually provoked a reaction to its strictures and definitions in the 19th century at which time new claims were made about the nature of painting and sculpture. By the middle of the century, "modernist" approaches were introduced which adopted new subject matter and new painterly values. In large measure, the modern artists rejected, or contradicted, the standards and principles of the academies and the Renaissance tradition. By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, artists began to formulate the notion of truth to one's materials, recognizing that paint is pigment and the canvas a two-dimensional surface. At this time the call also went up for "Art for Art's Sake."
ART & ARTISTS: the Renaissance and the Rise of the Artist
The period of the Renaissance, (14th and 16th centuries) brought with it many important changes in the social and cultural position of the artist. Over the course of the period there is a steady rise in the status of the painter, sculptor, and architect and a growing sympathy expressed for the visual arts.
Painters and sculptors made a concerted effort to extricate themselves from their medieval heritage and to distinguish themselves from mere artisans.
At the beginning of the Renaissance, painters and sculptors were still regarded as members of the artisan class, and occupied a low rung on the social ladder. A shift begins to occur in the 14th century when painting, sculpture, and architecture began to form a group separate from the mechanical arts. In the 15th century, the training of a painter was expected to include knowledge of mathematical perspective, optics, geometry, and anatomy.
A major development in the Renaissance is the new emphasis on the realistic description of figures and objects in painting and sculpture. The call to "imitate nature" involved an almost scientific examination of optical phenomena. In order to make figures and objects appear three-dimensional, forms were "modeled" employing the optical principles of light and shade. These correctly rendered three-dimensional figures and objects were placed in a three-dimensional illusionistic space created through the newly developed device of linear perspective.
The knowledge and use of scientific methods placed painting and sculpture on a new basis that was intellectual, theoretical, literary, and scientific. Painters and sculptors could now claim that their profession required intellectual ability and knowledge. This permitted the claim that they were superior to mere craftsmen, and that painting and sculpture should be recognized as liberal arts.
Painters and sculptors also argued that they stood equal to poets; poetry and rhetoric, of course, were accepted as liberal arts. Part of the basis for this claim was the notion that painting and poetry were "sister arts", a concept the Renaissance developed from Horace's dictum Ut pictura poesis ("as a painting, so a poem"), and Simonides' description of painting as muta poesis ("silent poetry") and poetry as pictura loquens ("painting that speaks").
It is through this association with the poets that the concept of the "artist" as we know it begins to emerge.
During the Renaissance the revival of Plato and Platonism helped spread the notion of the divine inspiration of the poet, which Plato compared with that of the religious prophet. According to Plato, poets and musicians, prophets, were divinely inspired (a term originally meaning to breathe or blow into, and now understood as meaning to be filled with supernatural power or energy) and infused with enthusiasm ("en-theism" meaning possessed by a god, supernatural inspiration, prophetic or poetic frenzy).
In effect, the gods inspired, or spoke through, poets and musicians in same way god also spoke through prophets: to prophesy is to utter with divine inspiration.
The ancients believed that poets and prophets were inspired by a tutelary deity or attendant spirit, which the Romans called genius, that communicated to the world through chosen individuals. In the Renaissance, the source of inspiration became identified not with some pagan god or antique muse but with God himself.
It was at this time that artists such as Michelangelo began to be described by their contemporaries as "divine". At the same time there emerged the important of the artist as creator, a word formerly reserved for God alone.
This link with the divine immeasurable enhanced the status of the artist.
In the 16th century the new image emerges of the artist as genius, giving to eccentric behaviour, or even slightly mad. The artist also appears as an intellectual given to abnormal modes of thought, and regarded as an inspired and special individual.
At the same time, the artist's work was regarded as unique and imbued with the artist's divinely-inspired creativitiy; in certain cases, an artist's work became the object the object of special pilgrimage and reverence. This attitude has perhaps grown over the centuries.
