Nicrat wrote:
Art is conveying emotions or an idea while making no effort to tell the immedaite patron how to think. Atleast I find that kind of art the most beautiful. The more brazen of the audience ultimately shape the publics opinion.
Tell me what you think : )
Conveying emotions=expression.
Expression was considered a universally important aspect of art for a relatively short time in art history, let's say roughly from the 19th to the middle of the 20th century. The idea had been floating around throughout the modern era (starting from perhaps the Renaissance), but reached its fullest and most explicit formulation in the Romantic period (with its notions of "the mad genius" and the imagination[1]), and eventually led to what could be considered its logical conclusion -- abstract expressionism, where everything, including pictorial representation, is eliminated in favor of "pure" transmission of the artist's "vision" or "emotional state". Of course, this led to a lot of artistic masturbation[2], which led to Pop Art and Minimalism, neither of which value very much the old Romanticized notion of the artist or art.
[1]Our current concept of the imagination - and tendency to glorify it - is more or less invented in this period.
[2]Not to say all of it was crap. (Rothko represent!) But a lot of it was.
Iunno, the idea that pigment on a canvas (or chiseled marble, or ink on dead tree, or pixels on a screen) can somehow be connected to the configuration of chemicals and electrical energy within our brain seems a little ridiculous to me.