Great post, thank you! I would add one more criterion to Danto's four about what constitutes art: that the artist leave on the piece some physical trace of unique human authorship. Warhol's Brillo boxes were constructed of plywood, silkscreened and painted to resemble their grocery store counterparts. In their small variations, you could see the hand of the artist and his assistants. This gave them a sort of independent soul that Warhol tried to erase. A banana taped to a wall is stretching the concept in my book, but maybe...the way it's taped? The act of taping? You can make the argument either way, and maybe art lies in the fact that it provokes such resistance in the mind of the viewer.
Addendum: maybe what gives a piece of art its presence or soul results from the focused attention the artist put into conceiving and making the work. Certainly there's an energy exchange when we look---really look---at the piece.
Hey Felicia, thanks for your comments! I can understand why Warhol wanted to erase that element of individual human presence, given the aim of the work in question. But in general I totally agree, the embodied nature of artistic creation is (and perhaps should be?) detectable in the resulting work. Undoubtedly, when you 'zoom into' a painting, to look at the brush strokes for example, and then zoom out to look at the composition as a whole, there's a mutually enlightening interpretive experience that usually feeds into a greater appreciation of the whole. I say 'usually', as when you look closely at Mondrian's Composition, for example, the experience of seeing human imperfections works against the geometric aims of the painting (in my opinion!)
Great post, thank you! I would add one more criterion to Danto's four about what constitutes art: that the artist leave on the piece some physical trace of unique human authorship. Warhol's Brillo boxes were constructed of plywood, silkscreened and painted to resemble their grocery store counterparts. In their small variations, you could see the hand of the artist and his assistants. This gave them a sort of independent soul that Warhol tried to erase. A banana taped to a wall is stretching the concept in my book, but maybe...the way it's taped? The act of taping? You can make the argument either way, and maybe art lies in the fact that it provokes such resistance in the mind of the viewer.
Addendum: maybe what gives a piece of art its presence or soul results from the focused attention the artist put into conceiving and making the work. Certainly there's an energy exchange when we look---really look---at the piece.
Hey Felicia, thanks for your comments! I can understand why Warhol wanted to erase that element of individual human presence, given the aim of the work in question. But in general I totally agree, the embodied nature of artistic creation is (and perhaps should be?) detectable in the resulting work. Undoubtedly, when you 'zoom into' a painting, to look at the brush strokes for example, and then zoom out to look at the composition as a whole, there's a mutually enlightening interpretive experience that usually feeds into a greater appreciation of the whole. I say 'usually', as when you look closely at Mondrian's Composition, for example, the experience of seeing human imperfections works against the geometric aims of the painting (in my opinion!)