what is art?

what is art?

* hegel: “art, according to its own concept, can have no other calling than to give sensuously adequate presence to a content that is already complete in itself; and the philosophy o fart must therefore make it is chief business to offer a thoughfully comprehensive account of what art truly is in its fullness of content as well as in its beautiful mode of appearance.”

*marcel Duchamp: appropriating images…nothing is original.

*andy Warhol: ‘i don’t make the art.’ this is really what has been going on for centuries. There have been apprentices since michaelangelo. so who is the artist?

*cindy Sherman: you are still the artist if you are in charge of the expression…the literal expression.

* jeff koons: art is what happens in the viewer.
"what people want to do most in life the most they avoid the most. and so the job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is, and through that people will live to their potential. they realize it's not about that object, it's not about that image, it's what is happening inside the viewer. that is where the art happens. the images are absolutely valueless. what happens inside the viewer--that's where the value is. it's about where they can go from that moment to achieve their desires."
-jeff koons- 

* Robert morris: art is where you are. Art is space specific. It is tied to the exact space that it occurs (earthworks, cristo and jeanne-claude)

* performance art: carolee sheeman…art is an action.

what is art now??? what are the current trends?

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham 
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“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.” 
― James Baldwin

Man needs spiritual expression and nourishing... even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. (Fernando Botero)

The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired. (Gustave Courbet)

“The magic question is, ‘What for?’ But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.” — Young-ha Kim

“Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.” — Antony Gormley

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde 
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In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson 
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Art is the proper task of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche 
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An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
George Santayana 
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To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
Leo Tolstoy 
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Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
Frank Lloyd Wright 
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“Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.” 
― Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge. (Leo Tolstoy)

The task of art is enormous... Art should cause violence to be set aside. And it is only art that can accomplish this. (Leo Tolstoy)

Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life. (Leo Tolstoy)

“If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom.” 
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On the Arts: Selections from G.W.F. Hegel's Aesthetics, or the Philosophy of Fine Art

A person must translate his freedom into an external sphere in order to exist as Idea.
Philosophy of Right (1821)

 Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
Thomas Carlyle 
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“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

John F. Kennedy

·       If there is some end in the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the chief good. Knowing this will have a great influence on how we live our lives.

ARIST. Nico. I.2.

The quality of life is determined by its activities. (Aristotle)

Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends. (Aristotle)

The energy of the mind is the essence of life. (Aristotle)