Punch Fine Art – definition into a search engine and numerous sites will pop up on the screen, one of them www.Visual-arts-cork.com has a paragraph headed “Problems of Definition” which concludes
“Because of this[…]it is almost impossible to define or fix a meaning to fine art”.
It goes on to say that in early civilizations, such as the Greek, Roman, Romanesque or Gothic, artists were regarded as skilled workers. It was with the Renaissance that Art became a profession and academies were set up to train would be artists.
These academies taught a highly traditional and regulated form of renaissance art that remained the standard, really until the early twentieth century when Modernism swept away the rules.
So now we have a situation in which Universities around the world offer Diplomas, Degrees, Mas etc in a subject that no one can define.
Art has become The Waste Land.
There is a Tarot card, one of the Major Arcana. It is entitled The Tower (sometimes The Burning Tower) Drawing this card is said to warn of a forthcoming, sudden upheaval. Upheavals can be traumatic and cause pain but they can also cause us to examine our lives, to re-evaluate our worlds and can shock us out of our stale and outmoded ways of thinking.
Maybe Modernism was the Ivory tower of art being torn asunder to make way for a more relevant art. If so it seems to me that present day artists are scrabbling around in the ruins holding up charred fragments and saying “is this art?” and it may well be. who knows?
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