Fine Art for Form One | All Topics | Full Notes
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The essence of a concept would assume that people have intellectual access to the said concept or definition.
Conception is an attempt by an individual to grasp the essence without having access to the concept or definition.
Thus art theory is focused on each individual as they use different conceptions in how they perceive art. It is unobtainable by concept and definition.
Are you confused yet? I hope not but most likely you are and that was the easy version.
In short we all see art uniquely from our own vantage point. To ask a class if a work of art is good or bad will yield many different answers.
Also asking what will make a good work of art in turn also will yield the same results in many answers. It is not quantifiable by concept thus it cannot be defined.
This is why art can tend to drive intellectuals insane which must classify everything. It is also one of the reasons for why Plato claimed that art was dangerous to society.
However we analyze it, it is very doubtful that representation possesses the explanatory power it would need in order to yield a one-concept theory of art. Clearly, there is art that is not at all representational: music is seldom and very inessentially representational; painting and sculpture can be abstract as well as figurative. Although in prose a subject may often be important, in poetry its importance can be much reduced and the poem be appreciated as an artifact in its own right rather than as a window on the non-art world. The work of representing may seem insufficiently ambitious. As the re-presenting or imitating of what nature or God has already created, it can at its best be technically notable, but must always be derivative and repetitious. The beauties of art are very seldom transcriptions, into a medium, of preexisting natural beauties.
The representational theory, say its critics, must deflect attention from the work of art and its distinctive values, to what is always other than itself. Artworks, however, call attention upon their own unique forms, lines, colors, images, meanings, patterns of sound. What we encounter in them we have not encountered and cannot encounter elsewhere in the world. Revelatory or not, an artwork does not become ‘disposable’ once we have extracted from it a message, a way of looking, a perspective.
On the other hand, however, why may we not understand music as representing the life of feeling, the flowings and checkings of vitality? Even abstract artists have often seen their work in revelatory terms, displaying hidden laws of nature, or metaphysical ideas. Could we not claim that art is always a mimesis (a copying) of nature: if not of nature’s visible appearances, then of its fundamental energies and their endless transformations?
