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The problem is the 'art is important' people think about stuff like The Peasant Dance (Breughel, 1568). When they say 'artists don't contribute' they think of t
by tmtvl 3y ago
The problem is the 'art is important' people think about stuff like The Peasant Dance (Breughel, 1568). When they say 'artists don't contribute' they think of the 120k USD banana taped to a wall (which was promptly eaten by a hungry student).
- eszed 3y agoIronically, the banana piece was all about pointing out the triviality of (much) contemporary art! But... Yeah. That's probably the explanation for the disconnect. It's so extreme, though. Everyone (literally everyone!) owns and / or enjoys things created by artists. I think the education- / elite-driven insistence that Real Art is fine art (or maybe just old art) - like, Breughal counts, but the exquisitely crafted mug my wife bought at the farmers market last week doesn't - has something to do with it as well. Which is stupid, because that whole idea was stomped to dust by 1900 or so, and yet it remains.
- chefandy 3y agoI just watched a solid mid-90s documentary about African art on YouTube. It focused on the colonial Europeans and subsequent anthropologists wild misinterpretation of beautiful African objects, and how that was used to justify the oppression. In many African traditions, the idea of "art" as it exists in the European cultural vein doesn't even exist: the aesthetic imbued into the practical everyday objects like masks used in ritual is inextricable from its function and the tradition of craft that informed its construction. It would be ridiculous to say it isn't art, but equally ridiculous to interact with it using Western philosophical conceptions of art. People in dominant positions justified steamrolling people whose humanity was inconvenient, in part, by insisting on the universality of the rigid, outdated, old Western conception of art... and they clearly still do.