Lesson 5 - Lecture

What is art? You're asked a question like this and what answer immediately pops into your mind? My my mind automatically just focuses in on painting but clearly that's not it because it is way to narrow minded of an answer. As Professor Peck states in the video, Art is the finely tuned sense of craftsmanship which celebrates a humans ability to render reality or fantasies. Now I found this interesting because it's obviously true. Anyone can deem something as art in any shape or form and there will always be someone who agrees that it's art and someone who doesn't. That's why we call them art critics.


Soon following this question, we learn from the video about the artist Marcel Duchamp, whom I found to be very interesting, and here's why this question correlates so well with him. He brought to the art world the new form of art called conceptual art - art that inspires the mind. The painting that pretty much defines conceptual art is the "Fountain", a urinal placed on its side. This was also part of the cubism technique that Duchamp skilled in the most. With cubism you bring in a fourth dimension, a different angle of the same object. And Duchamp did just that with the "Fountain"(Shown on the left). He gave a different conception of an object that at every angle you can tell it's a urinal, but his ideas made it into a fountain because he looked at it from a conceptual angle, another dimension. "He changed the long tradition of linking labor and merit in art."


What I liked about this video was that it also served as a history lesson. Obviously when you think of the World Wars you think of the war itself and how many people lost their lives during both of them and then the economic and financial problems that occurred with both. You don't really connect the war with art and how it was referenced by artists."People are defined by the political moment that their in, by the technological moment. Because they feel connected artists feel like they have to reference it somehow and people feel artists are responsible for talking about them"(Peck). Before the wars there was a prolonged peace and beauty in the paintings. Between the wars there was dark imagery and also considered a creative hot bed. After the wars it was a new city and new art. World War I and II probably had as much impact on nature as they did on politics. World War I prolonged areas of peace (Impressionism) after being driven by anarchy and angst.