What is the aesthetic goal of plastic art?

[coberst]

What is the aesthetic goal of plastic art?

Quickies from Wiki:
“Plastic arts are those visual arts that involve the use of materials that can be molded or modulated in some way, often in three dimensions. Examples are clay, paint and plaster.”
Aesthetics is commonly known as the study of sensory values. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature”.

The art historian is led to conclude that primitive humanity was impressed with the theosophical mystical insight view of reality, i.e. that underlying visible nature there must be a superior driving force; they imagined this force must have a human like form since they could not imagine a form any greater than the human form. This human world view moved from infinite polytheism to anthropological polytheism to present day anthropological monotheism.

“Whereas infinite polytheism presupposed a corresponding number of autonomous forces underlying the diverse phenomena of nature reformed polytheism perceived numerous natural phenomena as embodiments of one and the same power. Monotheism brought this refinement process to its culmination by establishing a single force as the original agent of all phenomena.”

How did antique wo/man approach an art form in which they considered that nature revealed “to the human eye only those aspects that are essential, random, and transitory, then art must create for them the essential, the meaningful, and the eternal parts”?

Riegl informs me that “the human hand fashions works from lifeless matter according to the same formal principles as nature does”. All human art production is at its core “nothing other than a contest with nature…The history of art is the history of the creative human being’s victories as he competes with nature.”

The human urge to create visual art is not the desire to imitate nature but it is a desire to compete with and to expose the essential aspects of nature. “Behind every work of art, then, we must presuppose the presence of a work of nature (or several such) with which the work of art is designed to compete.” Art is the means to accomplish the primary aesthetic goal of competing with nature while satisfying the inner urge to comprehend nature.

Art is meant to reveal the “essential, the meaningful, the eternal parts” of nature. In doing so wo/man judged that “only the perfect is entitled to exist in art”. Since in nature only the strongest prevailed so then in art only the perfect and the strong must prevail.


Quotes from Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts by Alois Riegl

[lawcat]

I prefer Plato's explanation: art, in today's language, is a matter of inspiration. It is a simple and beautiful conclusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_(dialogue)

[Boerseun]

Art is entirely subjective, and I don't think a universal "goal" exist for any art form, as such. Whatever floats the artists' boat, will do - and somewhere somebody will like it, for whatever reason.

I think the biggest problem with modern art lies in the formalizing thereof by academics and the market, who through formalizing it can get a better grip on it in order to merely turn it into another mass-produced consumer product aimed at the lowest common denominator. In a big way, they have succeeded. And killed off most of what soul art had.

Unfortunately the same goes for modern music, in my opinion.

Art is not a thing to be studied. Art is a thing to be done by an artist, and to be appreciated by his audience. If you had to learn how to paint, you weren't a painter to begin with. But we can turn it into a mass-product by taking any Tom, Dick and Harry off the street, and show them the techniques developed by the Old Masters and have them paint completely naive, soulless monkey-see monkey-do paintings which sells like hotcakes to a public who have been told that these guys paint nice by an equally inept corps of mass-produced art critics.

There is so much bloody pretension in art, it sickens me. And the original post in this thread does so to the n'th degree (no offense, coberst - nothing you said) because it looks so innocent, but tries to formalize and standardize something which is so fluid and liquid, it defies reason and definition and exist merely for its own sake.

Like porn, you will know art when you see it. The rest is just useless rubbish, because you get to make the final call in what is art in your life. Don't take any academic's or critic's word for what is art, and what is not. It's your call, and to hell with the rest. You will know what you like. Or you should, by now, at least. If you have to rely on others to supply you with a sense of aesthetics, then you suck. Sorry. I apologize for the rant, there. But this is an issue that really grinds my gears.

[coberst]

Everything that we think, know, or perceive is subjective.