What is art?
Kant also maintained that our experience of beauty is an experience of freedom. He argued, however, that beauty is not itself an objective property of things. When we judge that a natural object or a work of art is beautiful, on Kant’s view, we are indeed making a judgment about an object, but we are asserting that the object has a certain effect on us (and that it should have the same effect on all who view it). The effect produced by the “beautiful” object is to set our understanding and imagination in “free play” with one another, and it is the pleasure generated by this free play that leads us to judge the object to be beautiful (Kant, 98, 102–3).
Hegel agrees with Schiller (against Kant) that beauty is an objective property of things. In his view, however, beauty is the direct sensuous manifestation of freedom, (…). It shows us what freedom actually looks like and sounds like when it gives itself sensuous expression (…). Since true beauty is the direct sensuous expression of the freedom of spirit, it must be produced by free spirit for free spirit and so cannot be a mere product of nature.
Art is fundamentally a human creation
ART — FREEDOM
What then makes art different from other human creations?
Salon des Refusés– Not art vs Non- Art- this is the first instance in which some art is deeemed non-art. It was not stated that it wasn’t art but that while being art, it did not fulfil the expectations/requirements/conditions of art; these works went beyond accepted definitions. This gesture initiated a fundamental characteristic of all modernist art
art transgresses accepted definitions
- Photography and the crisis of representation. The invention of photography brought with it the questioning of the nature and role of art. This revisioning is also a response to modernity: in the ever changing human environment, change, innovation and search for new means of expression become a constant.
Art movements / manifestos
all forms of imitation must be despised, all forms of originality glorified
“Our growing need of truth is no longer satisfied with Form and Color as they have been understood hitherto”
“DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colours so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates”