This is actually a follow-up on the post Creativity I.
Today this question can be found on any artist BLOG or forum on the Internet. It is also very largely discussed in the sciences of philosophy, psychology and physics. It is within these studies that I have adopted my definition of art.
The difficulty in defining art is that it is not a noun but a process! That process starts with some form of psychic tension. Finally the psychic tension is constructively expressed in art forms which have the dual advantage of providing an emotional release to the artist and simultaneously producing socially useful and valuable objects which give comfort, delight, and understanding to others. Indeed, art is the highest procedure of the parataxis state not only because it results in aesthetic products, but because its symbols have ceased to be private in great part (or iconic) and now can be shared with others (have become symbolic).
Read (1951:251) quotes Tolstoy in this regard:
Art is human activity consisting in this: that one man consciously by means of certain external signs hands on to others feelings that he has lived through,and others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
In my gallery, "Abandoned" may be a good example of this communication. It is not trying to express the feelings of the dog but to provoke an emotion in the viewer. This is how I feel when I think of abandonment and actually has very little to do with the dog. The image is hopefully communicating what I can't express in words.
As in Munch's case, these motifs start in the form of obsessive archetypes (the shadow, the sick girl),proceed as a form of self-identification, and finally (with great art) free themselves from the iconic mode of private symbols and become part of the external public world. Thus we can trace in a single masterpiece the long journey from the collective unconscious (archetypes) to the personal unconscious (icons) through creativity to the personal preconscious, and finally to eternal collective display (art).
Art is the final product in the parataxic totemization of the traumatic aspects of the numinous element. The trauma first appears in archetypes and dreams which are already totemized to the extent that the experience can appear in consciousness with the ego present, albeit in an altered state (dreaming). Arieti (1967:337) tells us that "the creative process thus consists of an unconscious animation of the archetype."
Now that’s some pretty heavy stuff. Here is my one line understanding of the question :
“Art is sharing in the world of the senses what can not be sensed.”
You have 5 senses that fall into this definition and some art forms will manifest themselves in one or more of these.
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