No-one seems to know,
but everyone has an opinion.”
Curse you Robert Good! If only you had published your book when I first started Art School! How much more illuminated my traversing of the path into territory unknown could have been, had I been enlightened by the collected perceptions, definitions and opinions collated in, A New Dictionary of Art. Hours at the easel, days spent scratching and scrapping the application of paint on the walls and floors as I drew, painted, filmed, shot, did, didn’t read, wrote, whittled and weaved my way through the potential of all the things art can be; all in the fractious pursuit of creativity, expression, communication and somewhere at the back of all those reasons a deeper searching, a desire to figure-out what exactly, is art?
And am, in many ways, still blissfully non-the-wiser.
Language and word-based artist Robert Good’s book offers some 3000
definitions of art, ‘compiled from the internet,
established authorities, artists and institutions’. This ambitiously mad
plight of collecting and organising so many definitions reveals (what the
author himself acknowledges) much of what we may already expect, that art is and can be almost anything and everything!
Definitions in this book really do include everything
from, the literal/descriptive, ‘Music, literature and cinema’ to the metaphysical, ‘a way
for people to put something out there that cannot be said in words’ and the
entertainingly specific, ‘like a strawberry cake’ as plausible options in
answer to the question of ‘what is art?’ But how much does anyone really want to know?
From my perspective, art is something that is usually
best discovered through actively ‘doing’ and experiencing it through seeing it,
taking-part or making it rather than, on first instance, attempting to
understand it through reading pre-set definitions. I do not think people need a
comprehension of what ‘art’ is in order to produce something that is then
perceived as being art. In fact, from personal experience, the latter is often
the better and the closer one is, ‘not trying’ to make art, often
results in work which is less contrived and more genuine.
The book’s biggest problem and also its charm is the question
of whether what is presented here are a series of definitions or opinions. In-reality
it seems that it is a mixture of both and one could argue the semantics of what
is the ‘definition of definition’ as opposed to an opinion but then we would
still end up in a subjective state as this very book is trying to address. The
appeal of this is that established definitions from the likes of critics, Clive
Bell and Arthur Danto are anonymously embedded amongst definitions from
everyday people online. It has no hierarchy! Which is refreshing. Though
overall it depends on how seriously or not you want to take this book when, for
example, art defined as, ‘Largely a load
of old cobblers and a big sham’ and ‘Like
a mirror which reflects our inner selves’; ‘that piece of light in your pupils’, as confrontational or poetic
as they are still seem much more like opinions/beliefs than definitions to me...in
my humble opinion, of course!
There is nothing wrong with this but part of me still cannot shake-off the question of whether this book is really necessary if nothing other than a light-hearted piece of satire? Sometimes it falls into repetition of saying the same thing but worded in slightly different ways which also slightly weakens its argument, but on the other-hand, also demonstrates the individual subjectivism involved in interpreting what art is; as being something unique and personal to us all as individuals but with certain themes, symbols, readings that are inherently more universal. In the book’s opening introduction by Professor in aesthetics and philosophy of the mind, Derek Matravers’ offers an interesting viewpoint to what Good has produced as a whole,
‘...it [the book] makes a mockery of the modern world’s desire to systemise, to classify and to control. In particular, it mocks the modern world’s desire to put a boundary on creativity.’
And for those reasons A
New Dictionary of Art almost offers inspiration in its celebration of
diversity and the way in which art is its own language of multifaceted
readings. That it rebelliously seeks to continuously deify categorisation! Some
may even see it as a manifesto that art must never become definable and resist
categorisation least it become stagnant but it is also a celebration of the
things people find similar and different about art such as, ‘a desire to convey meaning’; ‘someone’s vision shared with others’; ‘from the world around us’.
For want of a better word, some of these ‘definitions’ at
their best, offer brilliant starting points for thinking about ways of making
work, generating ideas and opening-the-box on proliferating the possibilities
of what art can be, a few examples, ‘Does
not have to be man-made’; ‘Does not form
without growth and movement’; ‘The
opportunity for love between strangers’; ‘progressive’; ‘tilling the soil of
culture’. Anyone of these and hundreds of others besides demonstrate some
of the potential and scope of what the arts are/can be. There are so many it is
almost harder to articulate what isn’t
art than what it is! And it is certainly something that I am sure will only
continue to grow with time.
'A New Dictionary of Art' by Robert Good is available to buy now (at all good bookshops!)
See more about Robert Good’s work at FAB 2017 here:
http://spannerintheworkz.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/fab-4.html
