Re: Is IF art?


25 Oct 1995 11:44:27 GMT


>1.) Define art: Well, to me, art is just something that is beautiful, or
>not. It is something that communicates an important message, or not.
>Everything that man creates (as the Greeks apparently said :) is art.

Whoa. This business about the Greeks is getting out of hand. When it's said that
the Greeks referred to everything man-made as art, it is just because of this:
that it is man-made; i.e. artificial, an artifice. This is as opposed to the
natural, where the natural is that which (duh) occurs in and by nature. Hence, a
chair is called art only inasmuch as it comes into being due to the chairmaker's
art and not by nature.

Works of "fine art" seem to exist for no other purpose beyond themselves. They
give pleasure to the soul, and that's about it. The other things that man makes
are for some purpose, as a chair is for sitting. One can say, when judging
between the maker of a three-legged chair and the maker of a two-legged chair,
that the former is a better artist, but this is to judge him as a maker of
things-to-be-sat-upon, and not as a "fine artist." On the other hand, if a chair
is both three-legged and possessed of beautiful adornments, we might say that the
maker is a "fine artist" as well, but in doing this we are judging the adornments
and not the chair simply as chair. This is because the chair-simply-as-chair
provides no aesthetic pleasure to the soul, while the adornments do (and the
adornments are not in any case any part of the "chairness" of the chair).

My purpose here, though, is not to argue for any particular doctrine of
aesthetics. It is to suggest that, if we are going to lump all the Greeks
together and talk about "their view," then it seems at least fair to say that
they, on the whole, admitted a distinction between art as artifice and art as
fine art (not to mention poetic art) and did not subscribe to the somewhat silly
notion hinted at in this newsgroup that everything man-made is a sculpture or
everything a melody or poem.


Jim Newland
76461.2144@compuserve.com