V
Vidja
Guest
What I find funny is that many people do not like to be called \"crafters\"... they feel the term diminishes their work, somehow.
I\'ve had this kind of discussion on every mailing list/message board I belong to, each time about a different craft: cross-stitch, rockpainting, even cooking...
I must say that I love the term \"crafter\"... it suggests a person who tries to improve his skill through patience and practice, and a sort of humility.
\"Artist\", on the other hand, is something of a marketing trick back to Romanticism, when painters and poets liked to have people believing they were merely a vessel for \"inspiration\", which was totally unrelated to skill/practice....
Now, I don\'t believe in inspiration. I mean, sometimes you have a sudden idea about how a thing could be painted, but God/the Muse/whatever has nothing to do with it... the connection was already there, in your subconscious mind, and of course the more practice you have, the easier it will be to make it surface at will.
Before 1800 or so, the distinction between crafter and artist didn\'t even make sense... of course, you could already be \"good\" or \"bad\" back then. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and such did tons of proof sketches before doing anything, and it took them years to complete a single work. They believed in practice and technique, while today the common opinion is that if you ever concern yourself with such mean things, you\'re not an artist because you lack inspiration... that is due primarily to Romantic thinking, and then to the concept of \"modern\" art.
It was easy, once, to tell whether an artist was good or not... if his painting looked like the real thing, then he was good, otherwise he was crap. Artist were called to fix a given instant through their technique, be it a landscape under a particular light, a visage, or a basket of half-rotting fruits. If you could do a rendition so life-like that it even fooled birds and insects, like that ancent Greek guy whose name I\'ve forgotten, then you were truly great.
Then, photography was invented, and photography could fix reality far more objectively that any painter could (because it\'s a chemical reaction that does the trick, thus eliminating much of the \"subjective\" interpretation a painter would have to make - that\'s why they want you to put a photo on your documents, not a painted portrait).
There was no need to pay a painter for that, so artists had to find a new function - the emphasis shifted to originality, inspiration and \"impression\"; painting in a naturalistic way was now considered a shortcoming of the artist\'s - and this convinction grew stronger and stronger, while art became more and more abstract (from Romanticism to Impressionism, then Expressionism, until we arrive to Cubism and the new \"-isms\", with the total dissolution of the concepts of form and volume - thus, slashed canvasses, Campbell soups, and blob-like sculptures).
When you say that art is about expressing a feeling/concept, you\'re actually conforming to a (realtively) modern vision, dating back to little more than 200 years.
...OK, it\'s over... I won\'t bore you further.
It\'s just that I will be away from home next week, and wanted to contribute to the discussion now that I can...
I\'ve had this kind of discussion on every mailing list/message board I belong to, each time about a different craft: cross-stitch, rockpainting, even cooking...
I must say that I love the term \"crafter\"... it suggests a person who tries to improve his skill through patience and practice, and a sort of humility.
\"Artist\", on the other hand, is something of a marketing trick back to Romanticism, when painters and poets liked to have people believing they were merely a vessel for \"inspiration\", which was totally unrelated to skill/practice....
Now, I don\'t believe in inspiration. I mean, sometimes you have a sudden idea about how a thing could be painted, but God/the Muse/whatever has nothing to do with it... the connection was already there, in your subconscious mind, and of course the more practice you have, the easier it will be to make it surface at will.
Before 1800 or so, the distinction between crafter and artist didn\'t even make sense... of course, you could already be \"good\" or \"bad\" back then. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and such did tons of proof sketches before doing anything, and it took them years to complete a single work. They believed in practice and technique, while today the common opinion is that if you ever concern yourself with such mean things, you\'re not an artist because you lack inspiration... that is due primarily to Romantic thinking, and then to the concept of \"modern\" art.
It was easy, once, to tell whether an artist was good or not... if his painting looked like the real thing, then he was good, otherwise he was crap. Artist were called to fix a given instant through their technique, be it a landscape under a particular light, a visage, or a basket of half-rotting fruits. If you could do a rendition so life-like that it even fooled birds and insects, like that ancent Greek guy whose name I\'ve forgotten, then you were truly great.
Then, photography was invented, and photography could fix reality far more objectively that any painter could (because it\'s a chemical reaction that does the trick, thus eliminating much of the \"subjective\" interpretation a painter would have to make - that\'s why they want you to put a photo on your documents, not a painted portrait).
There was no need to pay a painter for that, so artists had to find a new function - the emphasis shifted to originality, inspiration and \"impression\"; painting in a naturalistic way was now considered a shortcoming of the artist\'s - and this convinction grew stronger and stronger, while art became more and more abstract (from Romanticism to Impressionism, then Expressionism, until we arrive to Cubism and the new \"-isms\", with the total dissolution of the concepts of form and volume - thus, slashed canvasses, Campbell soups, and blob-like sculptures).
When you say that art is about expressing a feeling/concept, you\'re actually conforming to a (realtively) modern vision, dating back to little more than 200 years.
...OK, it\'s over... I won\'t bore you further.
It\'s just that I will be away from home next week, and wanted to contribute to the discussion now that I can...
