This is a response to Griffin's "can art be sinful or evil?"

I think art most certainly can have the  connotation of being sinful placed on it but the actual art itself can't be sinful or evil. To me evil is an act that is committed from one person with the intent to do harm on another. A painting can't physically harm another person, nor a statue. Same goes with being sinful. A painting itself can't be considered sinful, but perhaps the content of the painting is considered by some religions to be sinful. I think that these words, sinful or evil is subjective to each person and therefore it is impossible to categorize art in such a way.

The Definition of Art

The sole purpose of our Art and Philosophy class is to define what art is. First off, I think we should notice that in the course title it says the word philosophy. Philosophy is a wonderful, interesting field of study but at the end of the day you mostly just end up with more questions then you started with. Perhaps it was with this ideology that Weitz claimed that art is indefinable. After all the philosophers we have discussed in this class, I agree most with him. I guess partly because I don't know where to start defining art and every time I think our class gets close, we find something wrong with the theory or definition. It's frustrating and frankly I want to throw my hands up in the air and be done with it. However, because Weitz said that art is indefinable I went and looked in Webster's dictionary. In the dictionary art is defined as:  the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects.


1. Why don't we just use the dictionary definition to define art?


2. Why does the defining of art matter so much to philosophers?

This is a Response to Sarah LaBaire's Liposuction

Well I guess, if you are including tattoos and piercings as art then liposuction could be considered art as well. Liposuction does involve the body shaping it in a new way, but I think plastic surgery would be a better example of body art. The plastic surgeon is creating a new piece of art and has to make sure that the new body part not only looks good by it's own merit, but enhances a person's look as well.  Same goes for tattoos and piercings, I think tattoos are a better form of body art because your creating a separate entity/ product, just using the rest of the body as a canvas. where as piercings and liposuction are just changing the body's original form

Experience and Art

I think experience is one of the most important  components when creating art. However, what these philosophers that we are studying fail to incorporate in their theories is that their are different types of experience and different definitions of experience. One type of experience that we learned about from Freud was that artists use past experiences to create their artwork. From Tolstoy we learn that art is the experience of making the product but also gaining aesthetic emotion from the piece. Lastly the last use of  experience would be in the form of practice. Meaning that the artist was good at creating something simply because they had worked at producing the same thing over and over.

1. Which form of experience is the most important?
2. Could the equation of art be art = experience?

Clive Bell

I am really displeased with Thomas E. Wartenberg's  decision to include  Clive Bell's theory of art in The Nature of Art. I feel this because First of all, Clive Bell starts out by insulting his readers. His tone is one of arrogance and superiority, making your reader feel like a simpleton is not a good way to begin your defense of your theory. Besides that,my class and I discovered that Bell's theory is very flawed. His theory is flawed for two very big reasons. The first reason is that he can not explain what he means when he says  a piece of artwork has to evoke "aesthetic emotion". Bell claims that it is not of this world and only some people can feel that way. The second major flaw of this theory is that when taken to the literal sense, the audience ends up looking at nothing. The significant form of anything, according to Bell is to break it down to it's most abstract form. However, If you continue to do that, you will end up with a blank canvas and that to me doesn't seem to be art.

1. Does beauty play an important role in judging art?
2.What would dance look like if we used Clive Bell's theory?

This is a response to Amanda Olsen's Dreams, Day Dreams, and Nightmares.

I agree with Amanda's conclusion that daydreams are closer to the surface and are more easily changed. This is because the conscious part of your mind is contributing to your thoughts. In these daydreams you have the ability to manipulate them and think about what you want to happen. These don't really help a person to understand themselves on a deeper level. Dreams I believe send us messages from a deeper part of us or our "subconcious". During the day our minds are still consumed with social norms telling us that a thought or desire we have is wrong. However, when your asleep that part of the mind is at rest too so therefore your true feelings can be revealed and in a way you do not be threatened by them. When it comes to nightmares, I think  that they are just products of our imaginations that have gone to far. For example when we dream about supernatural beings, we don't necessarily have a clear image of them so our mind makes up an image that may be scary to us. However, when you have a realistic nightmare I think it is just our mind experimenting with a fear that we may or may not know we have in our waking life.

Curiosity and Creativity

Today in class we had a brief discussion on the connection between curiosity and creativity. It didn't come as a shock that people thought the two are intertwined. It makes sense that curiosity leads to creativity. If a person is interested in finding out about something, odds are they want to experiment different things. Sometimes, that ends up creating artwork. However, creativity can lead to curiosity as well. Say an artist is painting a picture and they don't like how it looks with the texture of  paint, they might experiment with other materials. For instance, oils or pastels.

1. Are artists more curious then the rest of us?
2.  Do artists have something else besides skill that makes them able to create such great works?

Response to Sarah LaBaire's Without Light

First of all I want to thank Sarah for raising an entirely new thought in my head. I never thought about art from the perspective of a blind person and for that I feel really bad. In my opinion, I say sure! There should be art that doesn't necessarily have to be visual. In fact, I think that would be a fantastic new category to add to the art world. Touch is one of the five senses, and your friend Josh's form of art sounds like an interesting phenomenon. Perhaps it will give people a chance to express themselves in other ways. I for instance can't draw very well but I love feeling different textures and to me I get emotions from different textures.

Response to Alex Cole

Alex raises a very interesting topic of discussion, is the intended emotion of the art more  important or is it of the same value that a person feels from viewing it?  I believe that intentionality of emotion is important to  a piece of art on some level because the reason the artist is creating the piece is to express himself/herself. If it is done well, the piece of art should reflect the artists emotion. However, we can't discredit the importance of what emotions the viewer feels. The art in a lot of instances is made for the viewer. Sometimes art can be ambiguous and it is a person's life experience or color preference that determines what emotion is evoked from a work of art.

Color in Art

When we go to school we are taught that certain colors are associated with emotions or feelings.  For example, yellow = happy, red = anger/love, blue = sadness. we grow older and then interpret art by our definition of the color. We don't recognize that the artist may come from a different background and to him/ her red = happy. That's the interesting thing about color, there is not a universal manual describing what each color represents. Also, colors can mean different things to different people because of experiences.

1.Based on Pavlov's experiment with getting the dogs mouthes to salivate at the sound of a bell, couldn't it be possible to associate a color with an emotion?

2. Why do other societies interpret colors in different ways then ours does?