A Art, Types of (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Concept of Art as Archaeologically Applicable
In this article I review arguments in favour of the need and possibility of importing a revitalized concept of art in archaeological reasoning. By comprehending the concept of art as a function, rather than as a property inherent within particular kinds of objects or events, I offer a way of understanding art as the mode in which a phenomenon operates when its ontological multiplicity, its variety of equally real modes of being, becomes exposed. Seen in this vein, art emerges as an entity both created and experienced when several potential versions of a thing or event are laid bare. I emphasize that an element's capacity to communicate such factual intersectionality requires effort in order to endure; and argue that it is the formats for such 'practices of maintenance' that constitute art-worlds situated in culture. I also assert that these strategies, like all formalized engagements with material culture, generate traces, and accordingly can be grasped by analyses of an archaeological record. To illustrate this idea, I discuss the red ochre rock paintings from Neolithic northern Sweden made between approximately 6000 and 4000 BP by hunter-gatherer communities that were also producing petroglyphs.
1992
In “Defining Art Historically” (BJA, 1979, pp.232-250), Jerrold Levinson defends the following definition: (R) X is a work of art at time t iff X is an object of which it is true at t that some person or persons having the appropriate proprietary right over X, nonpassingly intends (or intended) X for regard-as-a-work-of-art, i.e. regard in any way (or ways) in which objects in the extension of “art work” prior to t are or were correctly (or standardly) regarded. (p.240) Moreover, he suggests that this definition can form the generative component of a recursive definition of art, in harness with the initial condition: (I) Objects of the ur-arts are art works at t0 (and thereafter). It seems to me that there are numerous difficulties which confront this definition. In particular, there are difficulties involving: (1) the inclusion of a condition involving “appropriate proprietary rights”; (2) the reliance upon the intentions of independent individuals; (3) Levinson’s account of the notion of “regard-as-a-work-of-art”; and (4) the implicit insistence that art is necessarily backward-looking. Since Levinson’s paper has recently received some favourable press (e.g. see Noel Carroll, “Art, Practice, And Narrative”, Monist, pp.140-156, at p.155n.9), I think that some discussion of these problems is in order. I shall consider them in turn.
The Origins of Art: An Archaeological or a Philosophical Problem?
South African Journal of Art History, Issue 16, 2001 (34-57), 2001
During our century the demarcation lines between art and non-art have become vague to the extent that the continuation of art as a valuable component of culture is questionable. History of art and aesthetics have so far failed to delineate clearly those demarcation lines. Hence, an understanding of the origins of art is needed now more than ever because it may reveal the most important attributes of art in its very beginnings. This essay examines three theories which attempt to explain the origins of art from very different epistemological points of view: a naive empiricist point of view (H. Breuil), a rather simplistic cognitive point of view (E.H. Gombrich) and an extreme behaviorist point of view (W. Davis), the analysis and refutation of which comprise the major part of this essay. The analysis of these approaches to the problem shows that none offers an adequate explanation of the origins of art, mainly because each disregards either empirical or epistemological considerations or both. The behaviorist rejects all epistemological factors, but this hardly makes them immaterial; it only conceals them as implied and inevitable assumptions. An interdisciplinary approach is called for in order to elucidate the problem of the origins of art.
This course is an introduction to art history as a field of cultural production. The readings and conference discussions will be directed towards exploring not only the paradigmatic works of art and architecture from antiquity to post-modernity but also the interpretive texts produced about them. Emphasis will be placed on the shift of practices of artifact production with skilled crafting in pre-industrial societies towards modern definitions of art and visual culture with their distinctive socio-cultural status in the contemporary world. Case studies are thus drawn from ancient Near Eastern and classical antiquity as well as the Western post-industrial art. While the development of the discipline form 18th century onwards will be problematized, core discursive issues in art history such as representation, iconography, narrative, technology, style, museum studies will be addressed.
The cultural definition of art
Most modern definitions of art fail to successfully address the issue of the ever-changing nature of art, and rarely even attempt to provide an account which would be valid in more than just the modern Western context. This article develops a new theory which preserves the advantages of its predecessors, solves or avoids their problems, and has a scope wide enough to account for art of different times and cultures. An object is art in a given context, it is argued, iff some person(s) culturally competent in this context afforded it the status of a candidate for appreciation for reasons considered good in this context. This weakly institutional view is supplemented by auxiliary definitions explaining the notions of cultural contexts, competence and good reasons for affording the status. The relativisation to contexts brings increased explanatory power and scope, and the ability to account for the diversity of art.
2016
How do anthropologists study art differently from other social scientists? The differences lie in both form (the reliance on ethnographic method) and content (the focus on marginalized and exotic societies). Anthropologists almost invariably use ethnography as a research methodology. This means they generate much of their primary data through direct, personal, in-depth observations of normal life and interaction with respondents who inform them about the mundane details of their everyday life. When the dis-cipline developed in the first part of the twentieth century, anthropologists studied poor, exotic, non-Western cultures, often as the result of a coloni-alist encounter. Much of the discipline’s current identity derives from the archetypical experience of being the first Westerner to study in these distant places. The anthropologist was necessarily a generalist, recording informa-tion about language, environment, economy, religion, family life, govern-ance and so on, since this i...