Nature of Art
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Jennifer Arrington (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/07/01
Art is a broad topic with respect to the nature of human expression. It brings something out of human beings that does not seem to emerge in the more analytic modes of operation, the breakdown of barriers and dissolving of doors. Insofar as nature seems concerned with these components of human expressiveness, it doesn’t seem to care, but people care as if it represents some particulate of nature. There’s a wonderful saying, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” I think that Aristotle with that quotation was onto something because the nature of art is about the nature of nature in a manner of speaking (sorry for that one). It deals with the internal representation into the external, somewhat; but, rather, and more comprehensively, it represents the significant aspect of things through the removal of the excess, the extraneous. The transition from building to artistic expression seems like the addition for tincturing, or the reduction into the tincture itself. The former in the addition of flowery ornaments onto something; the latter expressed in the carving of the proverbial large stone or rock into the great statues and figurines of ancient and modern artistic forms such as the Statue of David. Of course, there are the earthy types of artists without regard for fancy abstractions or floating creativity devoid of the world. The world detached from the work. This might be functional, as with most modern corporate structures such as skyscrapers seen in the stereotype of New York or in the accoutrements of the Yorkers seen in styrofoam cups. A sense of the concrete, the practical, and the pragmatic as opposed to the airy, the fantastical, and the theoretic. The nature of art requires evaluation. That means some creator for the piece, and the appreciator (or derogator) for the piece of art. That means three basic referents and only a few modes of evaluation. There’s room for the indifferent, too. Functional cultures produce more of those don’t-give-a-damn types. Fashion culture is bound by this tacit set of norms, principles. In a simple set of possibilities, the general structure and the operations can come out of the apparent undulating whirlwind of difference, process, and representation of nature. That apparent diversity and motion in its variety over time is undergirded by the foundation, the human being. The nature of art, back to the point from Aristotle over 2,000 years ago, means the nature of nature, which implies the steady demarcation over time between art and nature. But that belies the truth of the matter, art imitate nature AND nature imitates art.
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