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Originally Posted by pyatnitski
Jalfrezi - seems like your idea of an artist is something like the (or a) necessary person involved in the creation of a specific piece of art. So the composer is an artist because it seems incoherent to imagine different people composing the same piece of music or different groups writing and directing the same film. However the player or actor isn't an artist because clearly different people can play or dance that piece of art. Is that fair?
I think this is interesting. Uniqueness wasn't explicitly the angle I come at it from but it is a consequence of Burgess's view that an artist is a creative person who seeks to explore the relationship between man and the external world: this implies uniqueness in the art.
There's also the problem that no two musicians will ever play the same piece identically, but to me that doesn't qualify them as artists.
(I'm glad you've focussed on the artist rather than the art form, because art is defined as anything an artist says is art. I know that's a somewhat annoying circular reference but it's one I've heard many times over the years from people with much greater experience of and involvement with the arts than me, and importantly it defends/supports the type of conceptual art that the popular reaction to is often "That's not art, I could do that").
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Originally Posted by pyatnitski
It seems a decent enough distinction if you think our differentiation of artworks is mostly sensitive to the qualities that make them art and not something else, perhaps more commercial considerations to do with copyright for example. Jazz would certainly be interesting, just because I imagine there'd be dissent even amongst jazz fans as to whether different versions of very widely interpreted standards were, in fact, the 'same song' in the artistically relevant sense. Improvisation would, I take it, be just instant composition.
This is one of the edge cases I mentioned earlier - apart from the jazz musicians who were clearly composers and therefore artists, I think that improvisational musicians should also be regarded as artists because there's enough of the musicians themselves in the performance to warrant it, even if the original was written by another person.
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Originally Posted by pyatnitski
Reminds me of a position that always confused but challenged me that photography can never actually be art, because it's a causally determined presentation of reality. The reality the photograph chooses to present might be art, but not the photographic aspect as there's no interpretive choice. It's certainly not the same view, and it seems wrong that photography doesn't involve interpretation, but it appears to aim at the same distinction between the specifically artistic move and other acts surrounding it which merely allow the artwork to be experienced by some people at some specific time.
My instinct would be that it's difficult to maintain these sorts of boundaries and thus continue to stably distinguish artists from artisans, but being a fuzzy concept doesn't mean it isn't the one we have.
This is the problem with focussing on the medium rather than the person. Is photography art? If at one extreme it's taken by an artist, yes. If at the other it's taken by a commercial photographer for an advertisement, or is a non artist taking holidays snaps then probably not. People get hung up on the idea that if it looks nice it's art and if it doesn't it isn't. Art is about intention.
I agree about the boundaries - there aren't hard lines separating artists from artisans but it's the best we can do.
Last edited by jalfrezi; 03-12-2017 at 05:17 AM.