Defenders sometimes claim that we are naturally sexual and naturally violent. Images of depicted sex and violence allow us to purge these otherwise negative and potentially destructive emotions and a harmless way.
It is odd that a debate which started over years ago between Aristotle and Plato has still yet to be resolved. Aristotle says that art has a positive value. Since art was not psychologically destabilizing it did not pose political threat that Plato thought it did. But more than that, Aristotle argued that artistic education was the responsibility of the State.
Aristotle on Artistic Education:. Their literary education should begin in their seventh year, and continue to their twenty-first year. This period is divided into two courses of training, one from age seven to puberty, and the other from puberty to age twenty-one.
Such education should not be left to private enterprise, but should be undertaken by the state. There are four main branches of education: reading and writing, Gymnastics, music, and painting. They should not be studied to achieve a specific aim, but in the liberal spirit which creates true freemen.
Thus, for example, gymnastics should not be pursued by itself exclusively, or it will result in a harsh savage type of character. Painting must not be studied merely to prevent people from being cheated in pictures, but to make them attend to physical beauty. Music must not be studied merely for amusement, but for the moral influence which it exerts on the feelings.
Indeed all true education is, as Plato saw, a training of our sympathies so that we may love and hate in a right manner. Consequences for Dance. At the earliest this shows why dance inherited a place subordinate to other arts since, in a sense, these other four could do everything that dance could do as art, but better.
Along with his defense they bought into his account of Art, that art is imitation, and that faithfulness to reality was goal and the standard of evaluation of art. Note that the standard for excellence was art's relation to something external to art, the "real world. They accept with Plato that if art cannot demonstrate its usefulness then is does not deserve our support or attention.
NB: Unlike mirroring, these are acts of intellect. After Aristotle:. The Mimetic Theory of Art was accepted by for generations by artists, philosophers, aestheticians, and art critics; that to say they believed that art was the faithful imitation of natural ideals. In mimetic theory, the main criterion for the evaluation of art was how closely the work imitated real life. The standard for excellence was art's relation to something external to art, the "real world" or at least, the "real world idealized.
Further the adherents of the view also presumed that art had to "sing for it's supper," that is, that art had to perform some productive work moral, religious, educational, social in order to justify the amount of time, money and other resources that we typically spend on it.
These questions boil down to three fundamental ones:. For example, is Plato's concept of imitation adequate? Zeuxis, it is said, painted some grapes so naturalistically that birds came to peck at them. Zeuxis conceded the contest: he had deceived the birds, but Parrhasius had deceived him. Such imitations may represent people either as better or as worse than people usually are, or it may neither go beyond nor fall below the average standard. Comedy is the imitation of the worse examples of humanity, understood however not in the sense of absolute badness, but only in so far as what is low and ignoble enters into what is laughable and comic.
Tragedy, on the other hand, is the representation of a serious or meaningful, rounded or finished, and more or less extended or far-reaching action -- a representation which is effected by action and not mere narration. It is fitted by portraying events which excite fear and pity in the mind of the observer to purify or purge these feelings and extend and regulate their sympathy.
It is thus a homeopathic curing of the passions. Insofar as art in general universalizes particular events, tragedy, in depicting passionate and critical situations, takes the observer outside the selfish and individual standpoint, and views them in connection with the general lot of human beings. This is similar to Aristotle's explanation of the use of orgiastic music in the worship of Bacchas and other deities: it affords an outlet for religious fervor and thus steadies one's religious sentiments.
It is not entirely clear what he meant. He may have meant that strong, emotional art provides a harmless outlet for strong, negative emotions that would otherwise be destructive to the individual perhaps the most popular interpretation currently , or he may have meant that it substitutes for them or that it transforms them. Art is an imitation later a representation of nature.
Paintings imitate visual scenes; Sculptures imitate three dimensional objects Drama imitates human behavior Music was always difficult for this theory to account for. Marsilio Ficino, a Renaissance Neo-Platonist suggested that it was the mimicking or representation of the Divine Geometry which orders the movement of the celestial spheres; To accept this theory of Art would seem to imply that good art accurately imitates nature of bad art does not faithfully imitate nature.
Plato on Mimetic Art: Plato thought art was essentially was mimetic. His criticism of art cover a spectrum of perspectives: Mimetic Art is Useless: Art was useless. Moral: Art was unconcerned with morality, sometimes even teaching immoral lessons.
Psychological: Art was psychologically de-stabilizing. Susan Sontag It must be admitted that if imitation is the sole purpose of the graphic arts, it is surprising that the works of such arts are ever looked upon as more than curiosities, or ingenious toys, are ever taken seriously by grown-up people.
Roger Fry Note: But do we beg the question against the arts by looking exclusively for propositional knowledge see renderings of molecules. Art is not useless; it is natural : Claims that it is natural for human beings to imitate. Epistemological: Art is not entirely deceptive according to Aristotle because artists must accurately portray reality to be successful. Moral: Aristotle believed that drama was an excellent way of teaching morality.
Psychological: Aristotle believed that strong art did stir up negative emotions but, he also believed that these negative emotions were then purged in an harmless, healthy way. Political: Since art was not psychologically destabilizing it did not pose political threat that Plato thought it did. After Aristotle: The Mimetic Theory of Art was accepted by for generations by artists, philosophers, aestheticians, and art critics; that to say they believed that art was the faithful imitation of natural ideals.
Questions: Must artworks always represent something? Are all artworks and all arts representational? What differentiates art representations from ordinary, non-art representations, for example, non-art uses of pictures and language? What is representation, and what makes an artwork, say, a picture, a representation of its subject and not of something else? What is the value of representation in the arts?
These questions boil down to three fundamental ones: 1 Is representation or, more narrowly, imitation adequate to define the essence of art? Especially in completed mimesis, the artist does more than merely create an image. Precisely by doing so, he also creates the world that has to be imitated. And both activities have to be judged on their own merits: there is the art of making an image, and the art of creating a new world EXCLUSION There is a widespread propensity to regard only perfect creations as art.
Many creations that are not artful are looked down upon, if not excluded from the realm of art altogether Many works of art are excluded from the realm of art because of the nature of the world that is conjured op. That goes in the first place for the art of children role play, drawings and for children: not only literature for children, comics, but foremost mimetic toys puppet houses and toy trains, dolls and stuffed animals.
But also a lot of art for adults is rejected for the same reason: think of statues of saints and garden gnomes, of genres like horror, detective stories, science fiction, doctor novels; and of all forms of pop music that is closely connected to dance.
Even artworks that are accepted as such are classified in higher or lower forms. In as far as the nude is included in the system, it seems obligatory to make a distinction between 'artistic nudes' and 'pornography'. Other works of art are excluded because of the quality of the image itself. These scales of value are often combined. Wax figures like those of Madame Tussaud have an heteronomous medium as well as poor intersensory reduction.
Stuffed animals not only belong to the world of children, but they have also a low degree of intersensory reduction: they address not only the eye and the ear, but also to feeling hand and the skin.
But it is foremost photography that - although only in its most primitive forms - scores low on all fronts: it is the very paradigm of a heteronomous medium; it seldom resorts to suggestion; it mostly renders images that are either trivial family photos or taboo 'pornography' ; it seldom diverges from the real world; and it is, finally 'only a question of pressing the button'.
That is why photography is predestined to become the scapegoat of the visual arts: 'photographic rendering" continues to be the paradigm of everything that is loathed in the visual arts. No wonder that mimesis as such became quasi synonymous with non artistic - one of the many forms of the mimetic taboo - which, in its turn, lies at the roots of the actual problems with defining mimesis.
Thus, many kinds of images are unjustifiably banned from the realm of art. That does not mean that all images belong to the realm of art. All forms of instrumental mimesis have to be excluded in as far as they are read as signs and not as images sui generis: documentary photos, illustrations, schematic representations, and allegories 'pictorial language'. The elliptical use of the term 'art', together with the propensity to recognise only the highest achievements as art, is responsible, not only for rejection of minor forms of the image from the realm of art, but also for the converse move: the assimilation of superior achievements on other domains - from the design of a cathedral to the conception of a world view.
The standard example of such assimilation is architecture, which continues to unjustifiably be considered as art:: apart from imitative elements on columns and the like, architecture is spatial design, not an image of real or imaginary spaces.
In a first phase, the technique of making images is discovered through redirecting techniques that have been developed for other purposes: from the bough to a string instrument, from the polishing of axes to the polishing of statues, from informative use of language to evocative use - to mention only a few early examples.
Once a technique making images is discovered, ever new purely mimetic techniques are developed, and redirected in their turn to other purposes. Gradually, a whole array of mimetic techniques is developed that are subsumed under the name of 'art'.
The continuous redirecting of techniques towards new purposes is responsible for the fact that one and the same result can be obtained by different techniques, and that one and the same technique can be used for different purposes. That lies at the roots of many problems with the classification of kinds of purposes, because the goals are often referred to through the means. Thus three-dimensional non-moving images are mostly referred to as 'sculpture', even when they are cast in bronze or simply assembled.
The problem is very acute in the arts, especially since it is no longer evident that we are dealing with the art of making images. No wonder that there is a lot of confusion. Let us give some examples, first of transgressions between the arts themselves, and second, of transgressions beyond the realm of art. Either the artist replaces the words with meaningless syllables and retains only the prosody of language, so that he is imitating a kind of 'glossolalia' Ball.
Or he replaces the words with 'interjections' aaah! In all these cases, the poet is no longer making poetry, but an aural image, executed with the mouth instead of traditional instruments. Since, as a rule, the prosody of language - precisely the component of language that is purified and systematised in music - is withheld, we are dealing with a kind of intermediary form between music and aural mimesis, which unjustifiably poses as poetry.
What poses as 'visual poetry', on the other hand, is only an extension of the mimetic and semiotic use of the medium see 'Mimesis en medium', soon on this website. Formerly, it was mostly the sound of language that was used to add an aural image to the representations conjured up in the mind. More recently, the focus is shifting to the visual appearance of the written word. When the visual appearance of the words is used as a visual image that is added to the representations in the mind, we are dealing with new variants of the combination of word and image a kind of integrated illustration.
There is also 'visual poetry' that belongs to the domain of design see below. Other examples of transgression between the arts are to be found in music.
Under the guise of freeing the sound from its subordination under the tonal system, the realm of music was supposedly extended through the introduction of new sounds, produced by traditional or new instruments - including the mouth, like in Ligeti's Aventures - or by electronic generation.
In reality, only a new impulse was given to the old, but underdeveloped genre of aural mimesis see: ' Three kinds of soundscape, one music '.
There is also visual art that shifts to literature. Via the concept of 'concept art', Lawrence Weiner sells words on the walls of the museum that conjure up representations as visual art, if not as 'sculpture' like in 'En route' Examples of plastic arts that pose as aural mimesis or literature are rather rare.
Far more abundant are the examples of a shift to domains outside the realm of art:. Many artists have made this stride in full confidence of having elevated art to a higher level. Under the label 'design', we can subsume all kinds of transformations of nature in view of meeting human needs: gastronomy, clothes, furniture, interiors and architecture, cars, airplanes, yachts and machines, and what have you.
There is no doubt that we are dealing here with creations, but not every creation is art. Designers do not disclose an imaginary world, they add real products to the real world.
There is no doubt either that the diverse aesthetic categories apply not only to art, but also to design - and to the real world as such. But neither nature, nor all the forms of design resulting from its transformation are therefore transformed into art: philosophy of art and aesthetics are two distinct disciplines.
In the plastic arts, the stride towards design is made when - especially geometric - abstraction cuts off the umbilical cord with figuration.
Even then, with painters like Mondriaan, a last remnant of mimesis is still preserved: the lines seem to continue behind the frame, so that the frame is experienced as a kind of window with a view on an imaginary abstract pattern. But in many a work of figures like Barnett Newman and Frank Stella even this umbilical cord is cut off and we are entering the domain of two-dimensional design.
And that goes also when the canvas is covered with pure colour that totally coincides with itself, as is the case with the monochromes of Yves Klein. The implosion of the three-dimensional space suggested on the canvas into a mere two-dimensional plane seals the shift from art to design.
The idea of art as an imitation that dominated throughout centuries of art history dates back to ancient Greece. Entitled Mimesis, the group show featuring works by three contemporary artists will contemplate the changing perceptual relationship between man and nature , and between nature and art.
Since he regarded life as a mere and poor copy of perfect ideal forms, that the art was simply a copy of a copy , becoming the third removal from the reality and truth. Similarly, Aristotle traces art back to the love of imitation and recognizing likenesses which characterizes humans.
But rather than mere copying, he perceived art as a realization in the external form of a true idea.
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