COMMENSAL ISSUE 92

Dear Theo,

Recap ..... Art's purpose is communication.

Any creative/destructive act any creature does with the intention of communicating with any creature including itself is art.

In reply to your comments on art and its purpose C91, p14. "A phone call is communication, but isn't necessarily art".

My definition of art makes no reference to quality. This is a separate issue. It's just an attempt to explain what art is. I'll open up the discussion to include quality and perhaps you'll see where I'm coming from.

I suspect there would be a great deal of agreement between most of us about the quality of various conventional works of art, but art isn't restricted to what is subjectively considered to be good by the majority. Neither is it restricted to painting, writing, sculpture etc.

Many conventional works of art are about ways of communicating that are considered unacceptable or acceptable only in certain circumstances by most of us. War, physical and mental torture, for instance. Using my definition war, physical and mental torture are artistic mediums too, and this is the bullet you have to bite. I'm not trying to upset anyone. I'm just trying to point out that the perverted, the sadistic and the insane can make art too and they can choose mediums offensive to the moral majority. Art isn't just the uplifting and edifying, as we're led to believe. Art has its darker side. You might not like it, but art reflects life as someone once said.

There is a lot of stuck up sticky beekiness about what art is or isn't. There are at least as many views of the universe and everything as there are people on the planet. People express themselves according to their views and in mediums of their choice. Why should the scientist or engineer communicating via the language of science and technology be considered of less artistic merit than the Latin poet. People can choose to communicate in ways their personal aptitudes or present level of skills do not favour. The scientist who's a crap painter for example. I would not say his/her paintings were not art, just crap. Likewise, the success or otherwise of communication is irrelevant, indeed even if a work of art fails to communicate anything to anybody or communicates completely the wrong message, if the artist intended to communicate it's art.

Art can be poor, boring, mundane, functional or whatever and this brings me to your testing comment "a phone call is communication, but isn't necessarily art". I hope you now understand what I'm saying. My definition attempts to explain what art is, not what great art is. How do you classify which phone-calls, paintings, writings are or aren't art? Any attempt is surely just going to be a subjective view of the quality of the art.

Now to the purpose of art. Try turning the argument around. What's the artist's intention when he/she/it creates a work of art? What's the artist doing? What is the point of the artist creating a piece of art?

What is great art? Well you won't get a definition out of me on this one, but a debate might be interesting so I'll set the ball rolling.

Great art depends on the creation of an original idea. A cover of an original soundtrack can sound better than the original. A mechanical device can be improved. The style of one painter can be used by another, but great art is only made by the original artist.

Arguably all art is plagiarist to some extent, so what are the criteria that make it great?

John Stubbings

John : My feeling here is that you are using Humpty-Dumpty words. There’s glory for you. To define art as any communication may well allow you to include phone-calls within art’s orbit, but at the loss of precision and a debasing of the term. It’s not just a question of quality. Most people making phone-calls don’t consider themselves as indulging in artistry - and in case you think this is another case of people speaking prose all their lives without knowing it, I suspect artists, other than maybe Oscar Wilde, wouldn’t claim that a phone call of theirs was art (even bad art).

Take your examples of scientists as artists. A scientist is trying to communicate in a scientific paper. Is the scientific paper thereby art ? Where, thereby, is the difference between the arts and the sciences ? A scientist may use art in the delivery of his message, but this is then the medium rather than the message itself.

We need a definition of art as commonly understood, to act as a point of focus.

I don’t think great originality is essential in an artist. Take J S Bach for instance. His best tunes are often filched from hymns, dances or what have you, as was common practice. Similarly, the baroque style wasn’t invented by Bach. What makes his art great is that his technique is the peak of what could be achieved. Thereafter, baroque music had nowhere else to go.

Incidentally - has anyone been to see "Art" at Wyndham’s Theatre ? It’s really worth the effort if you have the chance. While it’s centred around a group of three friends’ various evaluations of an "all white" painting, it’s more to do with friendship than art, in my view.

Theo