Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

“Q: WHATS THE DEFINITION OF ART?”

ART
If you want to define art: it’s evidence of the mind and hand of man meant to externalize and ‘decorate’ the world in the broadest terms, which converts the alien and foreign to the personal and relatable.

In that sense, in the broadest sense, art is domestication of the world into something more desirable by man, provoking more attention and emotion from man. If you mean can we separate craft, from decoration, from design, from representation, from meaning then, yes we can. And a number of other dimensions as well.

In the most mundane evolutionary sense, art is nesting behavior applied to tool-making behavior, applied to mark-making behavior – satisfying a primal intuition for safety in familiarity.

I did my first philosophical work on art (“Sciencing Art”), and yes, it’s explicable, but art, like mythology, is accessible on a hierarchy of levels. Just like all intellectual projects are accessible on a hierarchy of levels from myth to theology, to philosophy, to empiricism, to science, to the endpoint of science: operationalism (construction from first principles).

Intro Slides from Course On Understanding Art
Here are the slides from the introduction of my course on Art, covering the “Measurement of Art”:
https://t.co/70NEqJsdOi

I haven’t recorded that course because my work on epistemology, science, economics, and law is the more urgent priority given the rate of collapse of our last century’s ambition to end empires and their wars in favor of nation states and free trade.

This Architecture As Art
At the time this cathedral was built, the community celebrated its success and gave jobs to workers, often 20% of regional income, to the production of these buildings, which were as much the center of civic life as television and the internet are today.

So, when you call this ugly, that means you don’t comprehend it. Is Gothic a better aesthetic? Well, in most things, it is.

There is ugly work. And we can ‘science’ both beautiful and ugly. It’s not that difficult.

One example is the decoration of buses with dangly bits in India. Is it gaudy? Of course, it is. Detail is a substitute for quality. But can we appreciate it on its own terms? Comparing it in context? Of course.

So, for example (and this one is common), we might think people from different ethnic groups look better or worse. Where understanding what constitutes beauty in that form (Think of the Ainu of Japan), who are an interesting mixture. Or each of the macro races of Africa. There is beauty in the excellence of the form.

So art, like all things, is a matter of understanding.

And with art, like morality, everyone thinks they’re competent, but almost no one is. And it’s easily demonstrable. 😉

It takes too much knowledge to comprehend whatever is outside or your experience bias, competency, and taste.

Reply addressees: @monitoringbias @kevinrcantrell