Response to Josh

Does art need to express to the artist at all?

            Cognitive art or art intended to make people think would not be expressing the artist’s emotions. Artists could also create a work intending to communicate an emotion to an audience instead of trying to understand more about their own emotions. People can understand what anger means and aim to communicate it without figuring out the unique aspects of their own emotions. Art could also be intended for the artist to develop their skills or to make them think without it being based around emotion, although I think most art has an emotional component. An artist could also fully understand their emotion having previously expressed it and intend a work of art as a way to revisit it. They could use art to reflect on their past. I suppose art could also be made as an attempt to understand someone else emotionally rather than the artist trying to understand their own emotions. Art could also be used to reflect on the subconscious an emotional response might then be secondary. Someone could also make art for the sake of beauty or to challenge the current standards. Many reasons exist for creating art that do not have to contain an expressive component.

            For any artists out there, what do you think you are trying to do when you create art? Express, communicate, challenge, etc?  

Response to Natalie

It is true that instinct comes prior to emotion, but without emotion would we use our instincts?

            I think that instincts come prior to emotion and can exist without emotion. An instinct is a response to stimuli that people are born with. They do not have the chance to use emotion or thought before acting on them. I suppose an instinctual behavior would be one that is acted upon without any learning or a reflex. An instinct could potentially be learned if it becomes a pattern of behavior acted upon without thought. I think we could have an emotional response after an instinct or in reaction to an instinct. Fleeing from a certain stimuli would probably occur before someone realized they were feeling fear. I guess we could have an instinctual emotional reaction, but not all instincts would involve emotion. Instinct is inherent, unlearned and probably the same throughout the majority of the species. Emotions are subjective and emotional dispositions are often included in the way we describe our personalities. I think emotions and instinct are closely linked. We react to stimuli without thought in instinct and we often seem to have emotional responses before we think through a situation. If we have an emotional response before thinking about something then this would fit under the category of instinct. Emotions also come from thinking about a situation though and instinct does not.

            How closely related are instinct and emotion?

Response to Brycen

Therefore, a question that I pose is can art be an expression of ideas without being able to communicate to the audience?

            I think art can express ideas without communicating them to others. This occurs when someone uses art as a method of getting their own emotions out as a way to understand them. The expression helps the person who creates the art but is not intended for the viewer to understand and the viewer may not be able to understand. This is I think what Collingwood means by art as expression, art allows the artist to recognize, come to terms with and clarify their own emotions. This is not to say that art cannot be intended to communicate to the audience, but if it is the goal is probably not expression of emotions. When someone makes art with the intention of having an audience receive it a certain way, they lose the freedom to fully explore their own emotional situation. When someone uses art to express emotions they are not entirely clear on what the emotions are beforehand so they cannot make art as expression and communication. I suppose this would not be the case if someone fully understood the emotional place they were in and still felt the need to articulate it. Someone might do this if they thought it would help them move past the emotions they understand, but are still weighing them down. Then they would be expressing them with a full understanding and could have a secondary goal of showing them to an audience. People could also create a work of art originally simply because they wanted to communicate a certain emotion to the audience and it could evolve into an expression of their own emotions. They could also express emotions in such a way that it is easily communicated to an audience, but I do think it would be hard to at the same time intend to communicate to an audience and to really plumb the depths of one’s own complicated emotional reactions. I think someone could hope that their expression of emotions would be relatable to other people, even if it was not a strict communication of a certain emotion. If people made are to express emotions and impart the general idea of what they were feeling to an audience, these two goals could be compatible.

            Do you feel when viewing art that you are receiving emotional communications from the artist?    

Horror and Philosophy

               I found a discussion on a forum that analyzes The Philosophy of Horror by Noel Carroll, which I read for my book review, and reaches a lot of the same conclusions that I do.  He also writes that it is not clear why people would not watch fantasy instead of horror and that it does not include human’s that act like monsters. He adds a criticism that if monsters are expected to appeal to our curiosity, then Carroll’s argument does not explain why we would watch films about the same monsters. It would seem that overtime vampires would stop inspiring curiosity and would start to seem normal. He does not mention that idea of breaking category distinctions that is so important to Carroll’s theory, but I think this is what is intended to be appealing to curiosity so it is somewhat implied. Overall I think the post at the top of the page on this forum is a good, quick look at horror and philosophy. He also finds that getting scared is an important part of horror even though Carroll finds fear to be a secondary part of horror and not why most people would read or watch it. I would agree that at least some of the appeal of horror has to do with the fear and other emotions like disgust that it inspires. Otherwise people would be content with non-horror fantasy and it is clear by the persistence of the horror genre that they are not.  

http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/why-do-we-enjoy-horror-films-28527.html

Why do you think people enjoy horror?   

Art and Theory

I read something today looking at how art and theory go together that said that they do not seem to have a lot of bearing on each other. Many artists do not look at theory in an academic way and many theorists do not realize the process of making art is so different from the theory. This is a piece of the article.

The Art Newspaper: The topic of the Frieze panel is “Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart?” What are your thoughts?

Robert Storr: I’m not sure that art and theory were ever that close to begin with. There are some artists who read theory seriously but not all that many. And some of the theoretical writing that was done about artists was very important, but what people now call theory is a vast field and a relatively small amount of it bears directly on art, or at least on art production.

We’re in a very strange situation where some artists have derived a lot from their theoretical reading but never as systematically as people are inclined to think. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who I know read theory carefully, nonetheless made a point of saying that it was not to be read in a kind of rigorous, academic way, but to help unblock thoughts and open up questions.

A lot of artists don’t want to tip their hands and show how selective and shallow their understanding is; a lot of people who do theory full time don’t really want to acknowledge that the process of making art is fundamentally different from the process of writing theory. And, therefore, even though you may share a vocabulary, you don’t share at all the same kind of generative process or goals.

How much impact do you think theory has on art?

Response to Andrea

However, is success even applicable to art, if it is so subjective?

I think the ways you suggested success enters into art are absolutely true. If the artist is happy with it and the individuals involved and in the audience are happy with it is has been successful. This does leave the question of how many people need to be happy with it for it to be a success. If the director is the only one who likes it is it a success? If one member of the audience likes it is it success? I do wonder where financial aspects come into play. With a student production monetary aspects are not terribly important, but in many productions a goal is for the members of the cast to receive a paycheck. If people are to survive as artists there has to be financial gain and this is a kind of success. If a play is not particularly liked by the cast and crew but it makes money is it a success? Also if a student production is not well liked, is it still a success if the students learned something in the process? I think success is applicable to art but first it has to be determined what the goal of the art is. If the goal is making a profit and it does it is successful. If the goal is education then if people learn it is successful. If the goal is happiness and people like it then it is successful. A play does not have to make people happy to be a success though. If the audience does not like it but it causes them to question their outlook on something, that is a different sort of success. The artist could also create a work to release pent up emotions and if it does so it has succeeded even if nobody including the artist likes the final product.  

                What goals are typical of an artist when they produce a work and how can they determine if they are successful?

Response to Brycen

Now a question that I pose is could something that is ones skill also be something that they are talented at?

I think something one is skilled at is often something that one is talented at because I think people often enjoy things they are talented at so they work at them and gain skills. That is not to say that someone cannot learn something they are not talented at, people often do, or dislike something they are talented at. I do think that when people try something and are good at it they come to like it and want to continue. This talent may give them self esteem which allows them to continue the subject even when they struggle with it. They remember that they can do it and so they do not give up. When someone struggles with every aspect of something they learn it is much easier to simply stop and say they cannot do it. I think many skilled people began as simply talented and may have surpassed their natural skill as they gained skill or combined their talent with skill.

Do you think having talent inclines people to gain skills?