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Saturday, August 17. 2024

What is art?

Roger Kimball feels art ought to be about beauty, plus some ethics.


His piece sounds like the late, great Roger Scruton, which is a compliment.


But I do not understand the differences between fine art, illustration, or decoration. In fact, with music, visual arts, or performing arts, I just dunno. Is it interesting?






Roger Scruton - Why Beauty Matters (2009) from Mirza Akdeniz on Vimeo.

Posted by Bird Dog in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 15:50 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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The real question then would be:
"Who gets to define beauty?"
#1 Mark Matis on 2024-08-18 05:32 (Reply)
Roger Scruton was a great man. There are so few of them these days. I (a completely obscure ex-artist now dumpster business guy) read all of his books and had a deep, rather intimidated respect for him. He was a clear thinker, even more rare in any age.
#2 Floyd Alsbach (Link) on 2024-08-18 07:57 (Reply)
God defines beauty. That's why all real art is religious. It's not to say that art has to be pretty or attractive. Beauty is that which speaks to the human condition. That's how a painting of a lonely, painful death in old age holds beauty.
#3 jack walter on 2024-08-18 08:02 (Reply)
Fine art is done just because. Because you want to, you need to, you have to. A subset of this is art for hire such as portraiture. Even then, the artist gives an interpretation from his/her on vision.

Illustration augments a story or idea. It's a "helper". It springs from what it illustrates.. Like the definition of the word "illustrate", it clarifies or serves.

Decoration is making something pretty. It adorns or embellishes an object.

And yes, there is overlap between all of these.

At least that is how I see it and I have done all three.
#4 Hilda (Link) on 2024-08-18 12:55 (Reply)
The wife and I had the opportunity to visit the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, IT last January. WOW!
Seeing in person so many brilliant, old, pieces of art in person was wonderful.
There was one room with modern art...people stuck their heads in and immediately left, almost disgusted.
Now, I realize modern "art" lovers likely won't visit the Uffizi, but still....
Oddly, we somehow missed seeing "The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli. Oops.
I do think true art is a gift from God's love of truth, beauty, and goodness that makes us human.
#5 Mark on 2024-08-18 19:37 (Reply)
There is room for ugliness in art, if the subject one is portraying is intrinsically ugly. My example of this is Picasso's Guernica. He set out to portray the chaos, the horror, and the anarchy of war; the pain of a wound not yet healed.
He was not taking something and making it ugly; he was taking something ugly and showing it in it's true form of ugliness. He wasn't stripping the beauty out of the scene; he was showing the scene with the beauty stripped out of it by war.
#6 Another guy named Dan on 2024-08-19 07:55 (Reply)

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