Performance, Conceptual and Big Idea # 182 is Art

But is it Art

Last week Nick Pearson's OPEN Ealing Modern Art course took a small diversion from it's usual painterly  considerations to look at other arts that blossomed particularly in the 1960's and 70s.
Now one of the big advantage of Paintings,  Sculptures and artefacts in general is that they can be displayed and traded without the presence of their creators - Performance art is much more engaging but less portable than this.
The session covered a whole load of people and ideas I'd not heard of including:
The circus trained Yves Klein and his Leap into the Void
The enigmatic ideas of Italian Piero Manzoni
and
the bizarrely outfitted Gilbert and George who as well as being their own art have created quite a  large amount of 'conventional' art.
But perhaps the most intriguing and challenging of these artists are/were Joseph Beuys  ( A German) and Marina Abramovic (A Serbian)


Joseph is we were told an artist who shone in the 20th century with ideas and publicity that almost outshone Warhol and Marina challenged herself and her audience as no other could.

Big Idea number 182 is Art

So a new topic and one that Crofton suggests covers not just the visual but also Music, Literature, Dance and Cinema.
Art is defined as
'The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture'
Art was something that great philosopher Plato grappled with finding them 'threatening'.
 I remember my secondary school art teacher Tom Davies  (I think this might be him now)
A Life Of Art from Anartist Productions on Vimeo.
seeking to define art as pretty much everything (quite radical in 1970s Essex) and Crofton points out that Art does have structures which define it and allow interpretation and engagement (and Marcel Duchamp certainly confronted this issue).
Art was for many years and still is for some cultures about glorification of deities and is considered a craft (artisan?) but the European renaissance and the flowering of Romanticism repositioned the 'great' artist as something more.
In current times artists are more about business and commodity than  the alchemist/ magician mantle they held during their golden age.


(Oh yes and it is of course 'Art'  which is quite a good play  by the playwright Yasmina Reza which was translated from the French original and ran in the West end  with various actors for a few years)