Defining Art Essay

1837 Words8 Pages
Art is worldwide and it is every which way we look. However how can we truly appreciate it without defining it? The act of defining art is so important because art is so active in our lives. In Elizabeth Telfer’s essay titled “Food as Art,” she writes, “The state spends some of its resources on support for the arts; educationalists try to inculcate some knowledge of and concern for the arts into their pupil; and individuals cultivate the arts, and regard someone with no respect of them as defective, a philistine(25).” Society pushes art on us, and most of us eat it up whether it is via our headphones, television, or our home décor. Defining the word allows us to look more deeply at art and bring more appreciation to the arts as a whole. Differentiating between what is art and what is not gives more credit to artists and can even open our eyes to some pieces that we never so much as considered to be art. As a result, art is the result of a human performance representing the artist’s experience that also gains a moving reaction from the audience Generally speaking, the vitality of “a human performance” in a piece art lies within the need for representation in art. What any piece of art represents derives from performance and the emotional thoughts and feelings put into it as a whole. Denis Dutton writes in his essay “Artistic Crimes,” It would be odd to say that the object somehow represents the performance of the artist, because to perceive the object is to perceive the performance…the object of our perception can be understood as representative of a human performance…the concept of performance is internal to our whole notion of art. Dutton’s whole argument of art centers on the performance in art. He goes on to note, “If we see an actor or a dancer or a violinist at work, we are constantly conscious of human agency… As performances, works of art represent ways in
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