What is art? recurring concepts in art
I remembered , last semester, when I talked with my advisor, Marina, about my concept of a final class project, she told me I had good idea but I lacked conversation with the art world. I need to look for an art family when I make something. I was very confused. Can what we make in ITP be something brand new and so innovative that doesn't exist before?
In the first class, Krantz said there is always a relationship between our works with the previous artists' works. It's an awareness of our art works. Before new media, there is a pre new media took place in the 1960s, a radical art movement in history. Some of the topic includes: the found object, conceptual art, the body, installation and etc. What we think is brand new actually has clues in history. We need to exchange and establish our own art awareness, which helps us know each design decision or reason when we make something.
I checked the full syllabus of this class which is 4 credits, and I really hope that this class can include topics of immersive environments, natural environments and other topics in the full one to the current syllabus. If time limited, I would like to have some after class readings which include topics above.
For this week's reading, I knew that actually from the 1960s, more and more people start to explore the relationship between art and technology, and experiment their combination. There was an institution called E.A.T.
Some of inspiring dialogues from the reading:
"demonstrate how engaged the pop artist was with scientific theories of vision and cognition"
"the art could redefine the goals of engineering, while technology could expand the possibilities of art"
"The engineer must come out of the rigid world that makes his work the antithesis of his life and the artist must be given the alternative of leaving the peculiar historic bubble known as the art world. The social implications of E.A.T. have less to do with bringing art and technology closer together than with exploring the possibilities of human interaction."
Sometimes I don't understand and get the idea of why some pieces of works can be called as art. I think different people have different opinions. And in the class, Krantz mentioned that it was one of the topic in art history that some artists said it was artist deciding what was art, not only the art institution. I want to ask if today's art world, accept this thinking?
For me, the meaning of art works have either two importance: one is conceptual idea, which means this idea can have social influence or other reflection or deep thinking; the other one is creating and exploring the possibilities of human interaction.
The first importance, I think it never changes. Since it's easy to discover that even if time changes, artists always explore or have focus on same topics, like nature, identity, body, and etc.. For the second importance, I think it changes with time. When history evolves, technology evolves. New technology brings new way of expressing art. New way of expressing art brings in new possibility of human interaction. And we use design to translate art language into industry world.
This is my reflection on this week's class and reading. I think it's important, because I start to find meaning for making art, it's relationship of design, and technology, and also start to find definition or standard of making art.