4 minute read
Do you consider yourself an artist?
MRS CAREY
Friedrich Schlegel
This article attempts to combine a bit of both…
I remember vividly a particular assembly at my first teaching post when I was still quite a new to the job. We arrived on a sleepy winter morning to hear a science teacher discuss modern art. The premise of his assembly was that modern art had 'gone too far' .
The teacher described how the Tate Gallery had promoted a 1964 replica of Duchamp’s Fountain, which exhibits a standard urinal found in many public toilets, set in the gallery and signed ‘R. Mutt 1917’ . Duchamp had coined the term ‘readymade, ’ where an ordinary manufactured object was displayed by the artist as a work of art. The teacher went on to discuss how years later Tracey Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for ‘My Bed’ , a messy disarray of objects which was put into a gallery space and captured people’s imagination.
The teacher claimed these objects could not be considered beautiful and therefore were ‘not art’ . He held modern art in some contempt and declared it was all rubbish.
To illustrate his point further, he revealed he was an amateur photographer and displayed some of his own accidental pictures interspersed with other artworks shown in a gallery or sold at a high value. He asked students to guess which were his pictures and which were ‘modern art’ by raising their hand, and in doing so hoped to ridicule some artworks.
The assembly progressed until the Head of Art at the time could not listen any longer in silence as her subject area was undermined and angrily interrupted:
“Mr X, do you consider yourself an artist? Well…no. Then your pictures are not art.
Who is to say what an aesthetic judgement is, and who decides what is art? Like any good Socratic philosopher, I will start by asking you some questions.
Trust your gut...
Does art have to be beautiful?
Tracey Emin has said “Art is for feeling not for looking. ” Arguably, art can push us to consider something which is not beautiful but instead something shocking or confronting. The Handmaid’s Tale and Kafka’s Metamorphosis are not easy to read but they move us. So perhaps we should replace the word beautiful with impactful, or pleasurable?
Is nature art? A cow looks across a field and takes an interest in their environment but not in the view. To us a landscape is beautiful, but is it art? If you were to walk through a gallery of paintings of the countryside, would you experience beauty in the same way as walking in the countryside itself? Does the setting matter? Compare the same item of fashion seen on the catwalk or on the high street. Or the same object hung on a gallery wall to be admired, or in the background of a stately home. Would Banksy’s street art be the same if it was chiselled out of its original position and put somewhere else? In a paid gallery?
Can ordinary objects be art? Take a moment to think about the Tube map. This is arguably a phenomenal piece of design. Consider the way the scale is compressed as we enter the suburbs; all lines are either horizonal, vertical or at 45 degrees to each other. It is an elegant solution to a design problem, but is it art?
Does art have to reflect things that are
good? Could a photograph of an atomic bomb be praised as art? How about a racist novel?
Like any good philosophy class, this may have left you with more questions than answers and following these questions will tempt you to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Whatever art is, many philosophers revere it. Hegel thought that art grabs at the absolute - it might reveal something to us and a level of reality we had not known before. Mary Mothersill in Beauty Restored considered that great works of art stand the test of time: “the beauties of
eloquence and poetry…maintain a universal, undisputed empire over
the minds of men”. Even Nietzsche saw the ideal life of human beings as centred on aesthetics. I dream that, just like the Tube map, some inspired artist will design an iconic electric car charging point that matches up to some of Gaudi’s designs in Barcelona. Finally, whatever our personal tastes, I agree with many a philosopher who has also concluded that:
What do you think? Pick one (or more!) of the questions above and try to reach an opinion on it. As you read more articles, consider whether your view changes.
