Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

UNDERSTANDING ART

Art is best intellectually understood as a technology no different from any other. That technology uses three basic axis:

1) craftsmanship,

2) design (aesthetics)

3) content

Art can be an innovation in materials and techniques, it can be an innovation in aesthetic appeal, and it can be used to advance the binding myths of a people. If all three of these are met we generally refer to this ‘high information density” as “high art” or just “art”. at the other end of the spectrum is utilitarian goods. In between is everything else.

We tend to organize by high art (monuments), editorial or commentary art (essays so to speak), decorative art, designed and decorated objects, designed objects, crafted objects, and commodity crafts. But this reflects all produced goods not just art.

Art evolves with crafting and materials technology. For example there are only so many properties to fashion: Stiffness, Texture, Cut, Pattern, Color, and combinations thereof – culminating in ‘information density’. And what we see in history is the evolution of styles to signal status with the evolutions in technology to produce stiffness, texture, cut, pattern, color and combinations thereof to produce status signals.

Art evolves with aesthetics – the most obvious being the medieval invention of the grid system, and Vermeer’s use of mirrors and prisms, and the 20th centuries use of negatives, photos, and projectors. And the 21st century’s use of digital imagery and animation. (Hollywood is a horrifically powerful magnet since with copyright laws, it’s possible to profit from proletarian art.) We have dramatically increased our sensory stimulation in various ways. Although monumental scale still seems to hold the high ground in aesthetics.

Art evolves with meaning. And this is where you’re going to find something interesting to discuss in your paper on Australia. Because a lot of things happened to art in the 19th and 20th centuries. We had the industrial revolution and this dramatically increased the demand for artistic signals as people entered the middle and consumer classes. Photography put a bullet in the income of painters and sculptors, and printing became even cheaper. We saw the same effect in the 1980’s with the expansion of the printing capability – producing high-quality posters. Although that died rather quickly.

So generally you can look at any era, and ask “what is changing in the market for decoration, symbolism, and status?” If you can answer those questions (and I know you can) then you can pick a single or set of pieces and discuss how they reflect the state of Australian crafts, economics, status signaling, and political and editorial ambitions, and attempts to make monuments.

Or you can type a lot of postmodern bullshit that has filled the pages of top twenty new york based art magazines since the second world war. lol

Curt