Never Mind the Bullocks…

Are you ready for the MAC to drop the bomb? Be warned, it's a big stinky mess! Here it comes . . .

 

What is this thing we've been calling art? Even for the Minister of Art and Culture, a hard-and-fast definition of the term seems to be elusive.

 

 

The cultural concept of art has developed primarily through Western culture (although Western culture has, in the 20th century, considered many works by African, Native American, Arctic, Aborigine, and Asian cultures as definable by the Western term "art," despite the fact that many of these cultures don't have an equivalent linguistic term).

 

Originally, the term art came from the Italian word arte, or skill. Arte, in the Italian Renaissance, referred to the creative works of skilled craftsmen, masons, painters, and sculptors—artists.

 

 

Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other Renaissance artists abandoned visual stylization of subject matter in favor of scientifically capturing proportions and perspective that seemed realistic and referential to Classical Greek and Roman Sculpture.

 

 

But in the art world, every citadel is a target for storming!

After three or four centuries of Western painting and sculpture concerning themselves with the illustration of a simulated scene, representing fantastic mythology, political persons, environments or family portraits, the lines that defined conventional art began to fuzz.

 

Impressionist painting and Post-Impressionism, like the works of Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne and Van Gogh, brought about a shift away from a focus on depicted subject matter, and christened a new canon for Western art that focused on how subject matter could be depicted.

 

 

The 20th century art critic Clement Greenberg disapproved of Kitsch art, work that represented traditional subjects, and did not visually live up to avante garde, modernist conventions.

 

 

Modernism was a 20th century overhaul of traditions. Work like that of Matisse, Picasso, Kirchner, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollack, Brancussi, and many more incarnations of modernism, tended to favor some degree of visual abstraction and stylization, for the sake of conveying the essence of an idea.

 

Every one of these art movements ending in "-ism" claims a new aesthetic territory that reinvents how the form of art serves its content.

 

 

In the 1950's, the work of Robert Rauschenburg often flew in the face of Greenberg's puritanical philosophy of art. Rauschenburg's and Jasper Johns' work often attended to recognizable and iconographic imagery. This rebellious trend exploded into Pop Art; the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Gary Indiana and many others, depicted imagery that was commonplace. Often, they were images found in commercial media.

 

 

The examination of commercially tied imagery through art made some waves with modernist critics and the denizens of high art. The modernist trend posited that art should strive to be free of ties to any representation other than the intrinsic qualities of the work itself. Pop Art (which thankfully doesn't end in "-ism"), with its ties to obvious visual subject matter, and certainly ties to mass-produced, commercially engendered imagery, threw into question what types of imagery were worthy of consideration as art.

 

The art world has grown more and more schizophrenic since then. The end of the 20th century has seen many traditional standards break down. For example, many pay respect to graffiti, tattoo art, comic books and commercially published work, found objects, happenings, industrial and commercial design, animation, and interactive work as art forms.

My suggestion is not to dwell on labels too heavily. Any creative gesture can be rationalized as art if you try hard enough, so enjoy what you like, hate what you hate, and let the Ministry of Art and Culture worry about categories and definitions.