Thursday, September 9, 2010

More Art

Well, this is what happens sometimes when you drink coffee laced with espresso late in the evening. You get a blog post at 3:00 am.


So what is art?


Wikipedia defines it as such: Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects the sensesemotions, and/or intellect.


I just went to church's website (a CHURCH mind you. I won't link it.)Where art is defined thus:


 Art is whatever someone consciously calls, ‘art' .  


Yowzers.


What's really odd is that in that same article there is a picture of Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" uh that is urinal.  Marcel Duchamp was a leading voice for the Dada movement. 


This is from the Dada Manifesto:






      A Young girl commits suicide. Because of What? DADA The spirits are telephoned. Who invented it? DADA Someone walks on your feet. It's DADA If you have serious ideas about life, If you make artistic discoveries and if all of a sudden your head begins to crackle with laughter, If you find all your ideas useless and ridiculous, know that



         IT IS DADA BEGINNING TO SPEAK TO YOU

I'm sorry, but Dada is not art. Not as art is historically defined. Dada is anti-art.  And I DON"T want it speaking to me.  And the thought that someone writing on a church blog would think that it is really depresses me. Doesn't that little excerpt just breath sulfur? 

Enough of those late night creepy thoughts.

Rich Bledsow, a recent speaker at our churches family camp defined art as taking the ordinary making it unfamiliar and giving it back to you in glorified form. That rang true with me. Why would people want paintings of things they see all the time? Pears and houses and flowers and boats on the water... We love these things. They are beautiful. They are good. When we isolate them in a piece of art and glorify them and present them in a new way for the viewer we share with them the goodness of God. "See these beautiful oranges? God was so good to give them to us."




So I guess what I'm trying to say is there must be some higher definition of art. 


My fonts are all wonky with the quotes I've put in. Sorry if it seems like I'm yelling. Really, I'm not. I can't get the bold to turn OFF!


There.  Kindof. Anyway.


Goodnight.










3 comments:

  1. Art is whatever someone consciously calls, ‘art' .

    Well, isn't that a perfect statement for our culture today? Whatever I say is, is.

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  2. Hi Kerri,
    You and our art major daughter Kayla would enjoy talking about the question, "What is art?" Despite the pressure at school to be shocking or controversial, she just kept aiming for beautiful and realistic. <3

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  3. Joyce, it really would be fun and I haven't forgotten about getting up to Washington. I guess there's peep pressure for artists just like everyone else. :/

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