What is the difference between expression and Art as it relates to painting? Is it strictly a matter of intent or must a painting have to include something more then simple expression to be called art? If there is a certain something, what is it and how is it experienced?
Painting is painting. Hang it up in a gallery and it is art. It’s an institutional, interpreted difference that need have nothing to do with the formal qualities of the piece itself.
Siatd
I agree this is what it normally has sunk to just as philosophy has sunk to the joy of self justification through argument. I’m curious if any others sense something more as to the distinction between art and expression at least theoretically.
Art is what artists make. Expression is what coffee machines do.
Seriously, what do you want? Someone to say that all art is ultimately an exploration of man’s relationship with God? Or the attempt by humanity to produce something of absolute perfection; to replicate, as it were, the Form of the Good?
pictures inspire certain emotions to a human based on intrinsic instinctive protocol. you paint something that makes the viewer feel a certain way.(and you can predict the effect,makeing it even somewhat of a tool,if i may)
that is how it is expressed.
sure movies are more powerfull with sound and thousands of pictures(animation) than a painting because there is more to consider.
on a personal level,i hate surreal art. it inspires nothing,no responce and is weak.
drift, with respect, I have to disagree with you that images evoke responses based on intrinsic instinctive protocol.
I don’t know anyone who has ever felt the same way as me about a painting. The visual response is much more complicated than instinct. For example, it contains no small amount of cultural literacy. Images that may mean nothing to you and I may provoke extremely powerful emotions in other contexts. (Think Allah cartoons.)
Many emotional responses that are evoked by images are entirely personal and unexpected. Unfortunately for most artists, there is no magic set of things that one can include in an image to ensure a certain response.
cheers,
gemty
The critic. Once there is criticism, there is Art. Where criticism is absent, so is Art. Art is indelibly linked with criticism, in a manner that one cannot exist without the other.
Now before you jump in and say: “Aha, so you’re saying the tree falling in the forest doesn’t make a sound if nobody is there to hear after all”, I must stress that Art is preeminently a matter where cognition prevales over conscious emotion derived from empirical sensorial data. To like depends on taste, whereas to understand depends on knowledge. It is chiefly the role of the critic (may he be the artist himself or a neutral party) to grasp what is intelligible in Art and render it coherently. What is material and immediate in Art consists an instrument of transport - and the material and immediate is dependent upon the existence of a sufficient number of adjacent minds to supply its material. These minds are necessary as the basic medium for Art and are responsible for “the current of ideas”. They provide a work of Art with its birth certificate.
Siatd
But most of this exists as expressions of wishful thinking. Can we really call this imagination art?
Drift
Could you elaborate as to how an artist communicates. Can the emotional results be predicted. For example, would a woman being raped on a beach at sunset feel the same viewing a painting as a woman having had enjoyable experiences during a sunset?
While it may be superfluous to divorce appreciation and “intellectual” criticism altogether as opposing parties, you will concede that that which is nothing but an expression of emotion is bad criticism.
To quote T. S Eliot in a Polemarchus manner,
“The question is not whether […] impressions are “true†or “falseâ€. So far as you can isolate the “impressionâ€, the pure feeling it is, of course, neither true nor false. The point is that you never rest at the pure feeling; you react in one of two ways, or, […] in a mixture of the two ways. The moment you try to put the impressions into words, you either begin to analyse and construct, to “ériger en loisâ€or you begin to create something else.”
touche! that is now the realm of individualism, that each have unique experiences in this maelstrom.(that consequently cause unpredictable unique reactions)
Now guys,i thought it was a total waste at the time,and i cared nothing for it, but that art coarse i took in school is coming back to me now.
so explain dreary’sad’ dark colors,and bright ‘happy’ lively colors? why would a mere color be linked to emotions? apparently they are.with no color,comes no picture.
(even latent) memorys in the mind are set off by certain ‘linking’ or similar experiences of touch or sight (art).yah and sound (art-music).
in essence,gemty,i’d say were both right on this one.
one is traumatic,at the core we simply binarily think"something is not good here". the other in the core,"this looks good. cosy.nothing wrong here."moves on unless the woman is real attractive
i also note art is a simulation of natural stimuli if that helps.
now i know lots of art was made because a point was trying to be put across, (the book island of dr.morue was wrote in opposition to (the debait of) vivisection of the day.it later became a film.)but i dont know alot of examples of it.
nature depiction(scenery) gives tranquility, art depicting harm/death gives fear. music is very profound in that it also relates to the emotions.how?why? how the hell would we ‘evolve’ to be receptive to music?music is supernatural. no other species has it.unless you argue repetitive mating calls or bird songs.or whale communications.
but,is it really music?i’d say it’s animal communication.
in conclution psycology my freind.find out how each color,sound and image relates to intrinsic emotion,and you can make someone feel anything. in theory.it’s highly scientific.
I see the difference between art and expression as one of “objective quality” I know it is a controversial politically incorrect idea so I am only speaking for me and how I differentiate between the two theoretically.
For me, true art is to the emotions as a text on mathematics is to the intellect. Both attempt to communicate precise qualaitative knowledge except one is aimed at the intellect and the other at emotional experience. I would basically agree with drift:
A work of art with the capacity to produce in the viewer the precise qualities of emotion intended by the artist has to be based on the objective relationship between the sensory and emotional. I believe that this is much more profound then we normally believe
The golden triangle or golden section in art for example is such a mathematical geometrical figure that is known to arouse a distinct emotion in the viewer.
britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/gol … dslide.htm
This is just a classic example and I am sure there are other objective corresponding relationships between the emotional and sensory.
But the point I am making is that expression is purely subjective while real art for me, and I know it is a minority opinion, expresses objective relationships that arouse a corresponding higher quality of emotion which is the quality the artist having experienced it, wants to share with those able to be open to it. The artist not only has experienced a higher quality of emotion but has the conscious knowledge able to associate it objectively with sensory input
Now you might ask what is the source of these objective relationships. As Simone Weil implies above, it is anonymous
Nick,
I don’t want to attack your personal theory for the seperation of art and expression but I have difficulty with the artist centric model of art that you are presenting here.
The viewer of a piece of art is an absolutely critical element in the exercise. Without a viewer, and without the viewer’s subjective emotional response, the piece falls in a forest where there is no one to hear it crash.
If anything, art seems to me to entail a relationship between artists and viewers, not a precise and objective transfer of knowledge. Many works are deliberately hazy and complicated, the artist doesn’t want you to be able to “read” the painting, they want you to think about it, and your own response to it.
cheers,
gemty
who is to say that anything created under human hands isnt art.
Hi gemty
Quite true. Art occurs! just like any form of communication occurs. This is a precise communication of an emotional experience between artist and viewer via the work of art. Art occurs while the communication is taking place.
I’m not saying it is an accepted definition except amongst those with an interest in these things from which I learned what ideal art is. The sphinx is such a work of art since its creation includes intentional mathematical relationships that have allowed people to feel a certain something intended.
Some artists serve as mediums where objective relationships move through them and are placed on the canvas. That is why they work so quickly. Instead of dabbling with this and that, they just let it flow through them.
I think someone like Frederic Church was like that. He would paint at amazing speed and yet produce works like “In the Heart of the Andes” which is an extraordinary cosmological depiction of the location.
artchive.com/artchive/C/chur … s.jpg.html
The idea I’m trying to express is that pure art is consciously created with the intent of direct communication while expression is just subjective reaction thrown to the public so to speak. There are many levels in-between.