Trouble With Art

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The Term “Art”

An Essay based on the Article
The Trouble with (the term) Art by Carolyn Dean

The subject matter of this essay is based on the original article 'The Trouble with (the term) Art' written by Carolyn Dean (professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California) and published in the Art Journal, Vol. 65, no. 2 (summer 2006), pp 25-32. As the title indicates, the theme of that article and of this essay should be “art” or, perhaps, more precisely the concept of “art” itself “for what art is seems to be at the very heart of the issue” (Carolyne Dean). The author of the article emphasizes the fact that the term “art” has been used by many scholars in various disciplines with different connotations. Carolyn
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The greatest problem is that we keep calling things “art” without regard to the objects' original purpose as given to them by those indigenous people who used or fabricated them in the first place. It is a fact, that in the many cultures whose products we call “primitive art,” there has been no concept of “art” in the contemporary West-European understanding of this word. Certainly there have been cultures that have developed a different understanding and appreciation of objects. Though, in many cases their primal role and worthiness stays hidden in the history, because there is no one left to be asked if there was an aesthetic evaluation present or if there was any concept of “art” at all. So, when we find the remains of an older culture, we simply apply our “Western” values and use our “Western” points of views. Instead, we should try to look at it through the eyes of the culture we are trying to study, on the basis of our findings. Unfortunately, we tend to have a comercial approach to it: how valuable is this piece of “primitive art”?. Even worse, it is not only the bygone cultures that we approach in this manner but also those cultures we have discovered in the colonised territories since the late

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