Art is everywhere, even if it is not called art. The new 2018 summer clothing styles are a type of art. This is art you wear. Good art induces an emotional reaction. New clothes induce positive feelings. Designer clothes give the best buzz. The former is individual and the latter is collective.
Great works of art exert power that is not diminished over time, power that goes beyond the normative bounds of any observer. I think this is only possible if force of these works reaches certain objective truths about the world that, if we have sufficient knowledge and emotion, can't be avoided because their power consists in their spontaneous ability to continue to generate new or deeper thoughts, newer more meaningful narratives in observers.
I don't think art is mainly about objective truths, I think it's more about transcendent subjective truths.
So the butcher, the baker, the cobbler, the culter, the chef...don't have an aesthetic?
— Cavacava
Ask the question in french and it's obvious they are more alike than different from each other.
artiste ou artisan? (artist or craftsman?)
Art galleries are the humanist temples secular people go to in order to get a religious jag without religion. — gurugeorge
So what happens to a religious in-humanist when they visit a gallery? — praxis
So what happens to a religious in-humanist when they visit a gallery?
— praxis
Their head explodes. — gurugeorge
Rather, in accordance with your claim that art provides an "religious jag," whatever art is congruent with their religious views would have the greatest potential to "induce an arrest in normal everyday consciousness" (what you claim is the goal or function of art) and whatever art was incongruent with their system of beliefs and meaning would likely fail to induce such an arrest in normal consciousness. Right? — praxis
Rather, in accordance with your claim that art provides an "religious jag," whatever art is congruent with their religious views would have the greatest potential to "induce an arrest in normal everyday consciousness" (what you claim is the goal or function of art) and whatever art was incongruent with their system of beliefs and meaning would likely fail to induce such an arrest in normal consciousness. Right?
— praxis
I don't think it's that cut and dried. — gurugeorge
secular humanists can enjoy the older, religious works of art, and religious people can enjoy some modernist art too — gurugeorge
the function of art as providing an arrest in normal everyday consciousness transcends questions of meaning in that social sense — gurugeorge
But to be really clear, then perhaps i should stick to "mystical" instead of religious. — gurugeorge
I do believe that mysticism is more at the root of religion than the kind of "social glue" factors that rationalists usually canvass, though they are important too. — gurugeorge
What do you think the goal of a work is? — Cavacava
Great works of art exert power that is not diminished over time, power that goes beyond the normative bounds of any observer. I think this is only possible if force of these works reaches certain objective truths about the world that, if we have sufficient knowledge and emotion, can't be avoided because their power consists in their spontaneous ability to continue to generate new or deeper thoughts, newer more meaningful narratives in observers. — Cavacava
A work of art shows us something exceptional of the mind of its creator, something fascinating about what it is to be human - something we could not see alone; and it is something which brings joy and awe to the act of seeing it. I do not do drugs, but I know well the mind-expansion I feel when contemplating great art.. — Tim3003
I don't think art is mainly about objective truths, I think it's more about transcendent subjective truths. — Tomseltje
Seems glib, but it's the only correct answer in my view: depends on the artist. Different artists have different goals, sometimes different goals for each work, or even different multiple goals for each work.
Any statement of the form "The goal of art is x," where x is some single or small list of things, is going to be way off-base re what's actually going on when people create artworks. — Terrapin Station
But I think there is an implicit focus on what some might call the highest or deepest kind of art. — macrosoft
I don't at all agree with distinctions like that, though — Terrapin Station
These reactions tell us about the observer, how they think about the work in question. — Terrapin Station
Sure, or, in other words, how the work exists for them, because the response is surely not only or even primarily thought. — macrosoft
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