Remembering Van GoghThe American Heritage Dictionary defines Art as the conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty. Britannica Online characterizes Art as the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others. Various artists have offered more poetic definitions. "Art is the signature of civilizations" -Beverly Sills. "Art is the child of nature" -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. "Art is the expression of the immortal part of man" -Ignace Paderewski. "Art is the escape from personality" -T.S. Eliot. Others are philosophical. "Art seems to me to be a state of soul more than anything else" -Marc Chagall. "Art is a revolt against man's fate" -Andre Malraux. "Art cannot be modern, art is timeless" -Egon Schiele. Some are cynical. "Art never expresses anything but itself" -Oscar Wilde. "Art is making something out of nothing and selling it" -Frank Zappa. "Art isn't something you marry, it's something you rape" -Edgar Degas. Others more positive. "Art is seduction, not rape" -Susan Sontag. "A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle" -Robert Henri. "Art is the triumph over chaos" -John Cheever. Some describe Art with humor. "Art isn't everything, it's just about everything" -Gertrude Stein. "You will think less of the Art, when you know the artist" -George Bernard Shaw. Others take it quite personally. "I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance, of course I could be prejudiced, I am a visual art" -Kermit the Frog. Perhaps my favorite definition is E.H. Gombrich’s non-definition, "There really is no such thing as Art, there are only artists"…..
No comments:
Post a Comment