Hello guys, this blog tends to record and document my little dreaming world about Art History, plus museum experiences.

In here, you may not find professional essays, but rather an insight into artworks, art theories, museum experiences, and so on.

To begin this journey, here are certain things worth discussing, based on Anne D’Alleva’s How to Write Art History, Chp. 1

What is ‘Art’?

I bet for many of you guys the word art refers to a Van-Gogh painting, or Da Vinci code, or a Michelangelo sculpture.

‘Art’ is a word in which often being used at all times, but difficult to define and find its place to stand. People find it challenging to decide what ‘Art” should be included and excluded. According to the broader history, there are two reasons why Art is complicated.

First, the term ‘Art’ has not been around very long in the Western region; and secondly, there is rarely an exact corresponding term in other culture.

In Europe, the word Art we commonly understand it in today emerged during the Renaissance, wherein the earlier period had no direct equivalent for it.

In Greek philosophy, Plato put forward the term “mimesis”, mean imitation, to talk about painting and sculptures. In ancient Greek, demiurges refer to those who work for people, which can refer to a cook as well as sculptors or painters. Over a thousand languages, none of them includes a precise translation of the term “art”.

In defining the word Art, “many people today would start from an essentially Post-Renaissance definition of art, such as paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and buildings made with unusual skills and inspiration by a person with specialised training to produce such works.”

According to this above definition, most people would agree that the decoration on the Sistine Chapel ceiling is a work of Art. (Even if the artist himself, Michelangelo, doesn’t particularly like it)  

The idea of art shifts over time. For example in the 19th century, it often happens that objects excluded sculptures, paintings and architecture of Africa, the Pacific and another region of the world, just because they’re widely recognised (wrongly) as “Primitive” or inferior to Western Art.

Another problem arises in which the definition of Art leaves out a lot of other things that people make and do. For instances, items made by women, such as baskets and ceramic pots made by people with craft skills but no professional training as artists. This kind of work may sometimes refer as “Folk-art” or “Low Art”.  

Lastly, people sometimes excluded “Modern Art” from the definition of Art, because they think that this does not have sufficient skills, seriousness or conceptual complexity. Many of the people or even yourself would have said “A child could make that! This is not Art!”

Although some people are perfectly happy to exclude anything from the category of “Art”, but this is not a reasonably productive attitude for a scholar. Excluding things from a class often devalues them and not justifying the category severe enough.

As my point of view about the definition of Art, it should be flexible and inclusive. It should be a term, a category, or an idea that get us looking at and thinking critically about different kinds of things people make and do.

Art should be potentially any material or visually-provoking thing (in some occasions it can even be intangible!) made by a person, or persons that invested social, political, spiritual and/ or value by the creator, user, viewers or patron. It should include both the decoration on Sistine Chapel, as well wooden figure from Papua New Guinea, Ottoman ceramic pitcher, and an advertising poster. It should also include any film or performances, which that “thing” are created with unique skills and with considerable attention to their appearances. Art can even have an economic value, but of course, not a financial benefit alone.

This way, I hope you all have a better understanding of what Art can potentially mean, as well be able to ask better questions and open ways of thinking about them.

Guys, what Art means to you? Do you have unique thoughts regarding the question of “What is Art”?  

- Reference from Anne D’Alleva’s How to Write Art History, Chp. 1