I don’t really know how the art could evolve besides just accurate shooting.
However, most composers and visual artists before Beethoven considered composition a craft, not an artform. So I don’t necessarily think it needs hard delineation. “What is art” discussions tend to go in circles though.
“Art” typically implies constructive, expressive creativity. There may be some measure of creativity involved in some instances, but it’s not expressive and it’s not constructive. It’s up to those using the word to decide whether this places it sufficiently far outside the typical “art” grouping to not deserve the label, for whatever purposes they wish to put it to.
Technically, anything done by humans (at the very least) can be art, and everything is—or so I’ve been told. However, I would argue that the vast majority of art, as diverse as it is, does share one property: its primary purpose is to be observed by other humans.
For example, consider a masterfully carved wooden chair that was commissioned by a millionaire, who intends to put it in his library so that he has something to sit on. According to the above-mentioned model, this chair is not art, because its primary purpose is purely utilitarian. If the same chair were created by an artist for the purpose of being exhibited at an art gallery, then the chair is art.
I think this is one way to interpret the term “constructive, expressive creativity”, though there may be others.
Google gives as sense 1, “effectively conveying thought or feeling,” and this is more or less what I meant.
constructive
Whereas money is the unit of caring, I’m not sure what difference in kind could apply.
I am not sure precisely what you are getting at. What I had meant was that art is typically the creation of something new, rather than the destruction of something existing. One could argue that they are creating new corpses, but broadly we perceive corpses as broken people, not people as aspiring corpses.
In any case, remember (as you earlier emphasized) that we are talking about clustering and relative degrees of similarity, not necessary and sufficient binary conditions. Can you stretch definitions to fit? Absolutely. But with each tug, we’re representing a point a little further from the center of the cluster.
I think this is present in military planning, and inferable from outcomes.
art is typically the creation of something new, rather than the destruction of something existing. One could argue that they are creating new corpses
That’s not at all how it seems to me. There is a good deal of inferential distance here.
Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.
There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.
--Sun Tzu, translated
The art lies in reducing the number of corpses,etc.
we are talking about clustering and relative degrees of similarity
Excellent, yes! I agree that in English “art”, unmodified, does not refer to war and should not be used to refer to war or a broader category of art of which one thinks war is a member. However, this is significantly due to historical use, rather than being the simplest stroke circumscribing a concept in concept-space. Excluding the art of war from “art” is somewhat like considering dolphins “fish”.
I acknowledge there is some tugging involved, but what hasn’t been shown to my satisfaction is that less tugging is involved for modern art, or other things generally considered art.
Your stretching pulls the word over so large an area as to render it almost meaningless. I feel as though it exists to further some other goal.
The last time I heard art defined, it was as “something which has additional layers of meaning beyond the plain interpretation”, or something like that. I’m not sure even that’s accurate.
However, if you’re going to insist on calling a spec ops team in action “art”, then that level of stretching is such that so could designing a diesel locomotive, or any number of other purely practical exercises which are not performed for their aesthetic value.
A “found object”, or Jackson Pollock painting, or what-have-you, is created primarily for aesthetic value and/or communication of additional layers of meaning.
It’s zawa all right.
Doesn’t make it not art.
I don’t really know how the art could evolve besides just accurate shooting.
However, most composers and visual artists before Beethoven considered composition a craft, not an artform. So I don’t necessarily think it needs hard delineation. “What is art” discussions tend to go in circles though.
“Art” typically implies constructive, expressive creativity. There may be some measure of creativity involved in some instances, but it’s not expressive and it’s not constructive. It’s up to those using the word to decide whether this places it sufficiently far outside the typical “art” grouping to not deserve the label, for whatever purposes they wish to put it to.
I don’t really know what this means.
Whereas money is the unit of caring, I’m not sure what difference in kind could apply.
Technically, anything done by humans (at the very least) can be art, and everything is—or so I’ve been told. However, I would argue that the vast majority of art, as diverse as it is, does share one property: its primary purpose is to be observed by other humans.
For example, consider a masterfully carved wooden chair that was commissioned by a millionaire, who intends to put it in his library so that he has something to sit on. According to the above-mentioned model, this chair is not art, because its primary purpose is purely utilitarian. If the same chair were created by an artist for the purpose of being exhibited at an art gallery, then the chair is art.
I think this is one way to interpret the term “constructive, expressive creativity”, though there may be others.
Google gives as sense 1, “effectively conveying thought or feeling,” and this is more or less what I meant.
I am not sure precisely what you are getting at. What I had meant was that art is typically the creation of something new, rather than the destruction of something existing. One could argue that they are creating new corpses, but broadly we perceive corpses as broken people, not people as aspiring corpses.
In any case, remember (as you earlier emphasized) that we are talking about clustering and relative degrees of similarity, not necessary and sufficient binary conditions. Can you stretch definitions to fit? Absolutely. But with each tug, we’re representing a point a little further from the center of the cluster.
I think this is present in military planning, and inferable from outcomes.
That’s not at all how it seems to me. There is a good deal of inferential distance here.
--Sun Tzu, translated
The art lies in reducing the number of corpses,etc.
Excellent, yes! I agree that in English “art”, unmodified, does not refer to war and should not be used to refer to war or a broader category of art of which one thinks war is a member. However, this is significantly due to historical use, rather than being the simplest stroke circumscribing a concept in concept-space. Excluding the art of war from “art” is somewhat like considering dolphins “fish”.
I acknowledge there is some tugging involved, but what hasn’t been shown to my satisfaction is that less tugging is involved for modern art, or other things generally considered art.
Your stretching pulls the word over so large an area as to render it almost meaningless. I feel as though it exists to further some other goal.
The last time I heard art defined, it was as “something which has additional layers of meaning beyond the plain interpretation”, or something like that. I’m not sure even that’s accurate.
However, if you’re going to insist on calling a spec ops team in action “art”, then that level of stretching is such that so could designing a diesel locomotive, or any number of other purely practical exercises which are not performed for their aesthetic value. A “found object”, or Jackson Pollock painting, or what-have-you, is created primarily for aesthetic value and/or communication of additional layers of meaning.
Art is a blast, un.