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Response to comment [from a Christian]: "Designing and making weapons is not an "art form". It's a craft..."

"Using them is a skill. Not an 'art form'. Just as using language is a skill ... that not everyone is especially good at."

Semantics.

Skills are the building blocks of what one day may become an art form. That's why they call martial artists for example--martial artists. You work at it for years and one day you become an artist--one who creates something new from his/her skill set.

It has been said that it takes 10,000 hours to be good at anything. If you've invested 10,000 hours in any given venture, you're going to be pretty at it.

Response to comment [from a pagan]: Lightbringer Bringin'NoLight.

"Fine demonstration serpentdove."

Lightbringer: "We all try to garner attention in some manner, some more than others..."

SD: Bringin'NoLight

Lightbringer: "Fine demonstration serpentdove."

You're an attention seeker?

Response to comment [from a Christian]: "Except that 'art' is not the pursuit of being "really good" at things (the pursuit of excellence). And it never has been, throughout all human history."

Semantics.

You can be good at a thing but that doesn't make you an artist (or excellent)--your word. Do you call the man who placed a crucifix in urine an artist? Maybe you do.

I don't. I call him a blasphemer.

You can pursue excellence and never achieve it. I know a man who tried to make sushi and he clubbed it.

The rice fell all over the place and it was visually unappealing. In Japan if you'd like to be a Sushi chef you must be selected as an apprentice and serve for many years. Then, one day you will be considered an artist or in this case a chef.

Response to comment [from a Christian]: [Language Arts]: "Yeah, because putting "arts" in the title in some school brochure couldn't possibly have been just foolish self-aggrandizement."

[Are you opposed to excellence?

Eccl 10:2, Jn 10:10] "Not at all. I'm opposed to the misuse of the term "art" to exclaim a high degree of excellence in some other human endeavor."

"And when people do pursue excellence as their primary achievement, they are not engaged in an art activity, but in the craftsmanship with which they are involved."

"When people engage in an artistic pursuit, they are not pursuing 'excellence'."

Are you opposed to individuals who have achieved "excellence in some human endeavor"?

Eccl 4:4

"The Art Institute of Chicago, where I went to graduate school, has an amazing collection of weaponry on display, from medieval bladed weapons to the earliest pistols and long guns, to early and mid-American firearms. And the excellence of the craftsmanship involved in many of those weapons is astounding. Especially considering the crudeness of the processes many of those makers were using at the time."

You'd like an NRA membership card? Lk 22:36

"But they weren't on display with the Monet's, or the Picasso's because as beautiful as they are, they are not works of art."

If you make swords or guns you have no artistry. If you make unrecognizable art (e.g. Picasso's Cubism) you are a bona fide artist.

"...Unlike Renoir, who painted his wife in such a way that she could be recognized (that is, the subject was a particular), Picasso was seeking for a universal. As he abstracted further, one cannot tell whether his women are blondes or brunettes. This is a move toward the universal and away from the particular. But if you go far enough, you abstracted women can become "all women" or even everything. But the difficulty is that when you get to that point of the viewer has no clue what his is looking at.

You have succeeded in making your own world on you canvas, and in this sense you have become god. But at the same time you have lost contact with the person who views your painting. We have come to position where we cannot communicate. The problem of modern man's loss of communication and his alienation did not have to wait for the computers and cybernetics. Picasso, the modern man, exhibited this far earlier in his art (pg. 30, The Second Step: Art. Schaeffer).

"They are extraordinary works of blade-smithing and gun-smithing..."

"...That doesn't make them any less beautiful, or less important to history, or less fun to look at. They're simply examples of a different category of human endeavor. That's all."

Guns are beautiful.

"...It is interesting that with the two women he [Picasso] married, Olga and Jacqueline, he painted them at times in the style closer to his earlier pink and blue periods, when as a younger man he was showing his great dexterity in the use of the classical style. But the ongoing flow of his work, Picasso was the modern man with the brokenness which is involved in it.

This modern man. This is the concept of truth by which we are surrounded. This is the spirit of the world to which we must say "No," no matter what face it puts on, including a theological one. This is what makes the chasm between the last generation and our generation, a break of more than 400 years, a greater break than that between the Renaissance and the generation before ours. The tragedy is not only that these talented men have reached the point of despair, but that so many who look on and admire really do not understand. They are influenced by the concepts, and yet they have never analyzed what it all means (pg. 30-31, Schaeffer).

Also see:

Humanism

Response to comment [from a Christian]: "He's opposed to the English language not conforming to his expectations."

Response to comment [from a Christian]: "...[A]rt is in the eye of the beholder..."

[The Origins of Semantics Mysticism - Leonardo da Vinci] "The best way to understand how modern man has been forced, often against his natural inclination, into these various levels of despair, which he has tried to alleviate by the use of loaded connotation words in the upper story, is by looking at one of the most brilliant men of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).

Leonardo died as the Reformation was beginning. Francis I, king of France, who took him to France where he died, was the king to whom John Calvin addressed his Institutes. As a Renaissance humanist, Leonardo gave an answer to life which was a complete contrast to what the reformers were giving.

The Reformation gave rise to a definite culture, particularly in Northern Europe, and the humanistic elements of the Renaissance (of which Leonardo was a spokesman) ultimately gave rise to the
despair of modern man which is now destroying that culture. Listen to what Giovanni Gentile, known, until his death, as Italy's greatest modern philosopher, has to say about Leonardo:

The unity of the inward illuminates the fantasy; and the intellect comes to break up this unity into the endless multiplicity of sensible appearances. Hence the anguish and the innermost tragedy of this universal man, divided between his irreconcilable worlds, leaves in the mind an infinite longing, made up as it were of regret and sadness. It is the longing for a Leonardo different from the Leonardo that he was, one who could have gathered himself up at each phase and remained, closed himself off either altogether in his fantasy or altogether in his intelligence.2

What Gentile is saying is this--that Leonardo as the first real mathematician in the modern sense really understood the problem with which modern man is not grappling. He understood that if man starts with himself alone and logically and rationally moves through mathematics, he never comes to a universal, only to particulars and mechanics. The problem can be formulated thus: how can finite man produce a unity which will cover these particulars? And if he cannot, how can these particulars have unity and meaning for him?

Leonardo was a Neoplatonist who followed Ficino, and he tried to resolve the dilemma on his canvas by painting the soul. The use of the word soul here does not mean the Christian idea of soul, but the universal. Thus, for example, he thought he could, as a painter, sketch the universal baby which would cover the particulars for all babies. But he never achieved it, any more than Picasso did in painting his abstractions. But there is a strong difference between these two. Leonardo was not a modern man and therefore could not accept modern man's irrational solution. So Leonardo died in despondency, for he would never let go of his hope of finding a unified field of knowledge which included both the universal and the particular, both mathematics and meaning. Had he been willing to accept an irrational dichotomy, as those who have extended the thinking of Kierkegaard have, he could have been at ease. But for him this would have been an impossible answer; men of this day, humanists though they may have been, would never have accepted such an irrational solution.

So there is an unbroken line from the humanism of the Renaissance to the modern philosophy, but in the process modern man accepted the "leap" which philosophers of the past would never have accepted, and have moved into three areas of despair: (1) simple nihilism; (2) the acceptance of the absolute dichotomy; (3) a semantic mysticism based on connotation words.

This new mysticism does not expect to find a unified field of knowledge. It has firmly concluded that the awful contradictory situation whereby meaning and true rationality (the upper and lower story) are irrevocably separated is intrinsic to the nature of the universe. On the other hand, the old romanticism never gave up the search to find a rational unity between the upper and lower story. This is the fundamental difference between them (pg. 61-63, Schaeffer)."

"...[Picasso] had attempted to create a universal by means of abstraction. His abstract painting had gone so far that it was no longer possible to distinguish a blonde from a brunette, or a man from a woman, or even a man from a chair. Abstraction had gone to such an extend that he had made his own universe on the canvas--in fact, he seemed at that time to be successfully playing at being god on his canvas. But at the moment when he painted a universal and not a particular, he ran head-on into one of the dilemmas of modern man--the loss of communication. The person standing in front of the painting has lost communication with the painting--he does not know what the subject-matter is. What is the use of being god on a two-by-four surface when nobody knows what you are talking about.

However, it is instructive to see what happened when Picasso fell in love. He began writing across his canvas "J-aime Eva." Suddenly there was now a communication between the people looking at the picture and Picasso. But it was an irrational communication. It was communication on the basis that he loved Eva, which we could understand, but not on the subject-matter of the painting. Here again is the leap. Because he is still a man he must leap, especially when he falls in love.

From that time on, it is possible to take Picasso's work and follow the curves of the paintings as he fell in and out of love. Later, for example, when he fell in love with Olga and married here, he painted her in a most human way. I am not saying the rest of his paintings are not great. He is a great painter, but he is a man who failed to do what he set out to do in his attempt to achieve a universal, and his whole life after this was a series of tensions. Later I saw some of his work when he fell in love again, with Jacqueline. I said at the time, "Picasso is in a new era--he loves this woman." True enough he later married her--his second marriage. Thus, in his paintings of Olga and Jacqueline, in a manner contrary to almost all of his other work, he expresses the irrational leap in the symbol system of the form of his paintings, but it is the same irrational leap which others express in words.

In passing, let us say that Salvador Dali (1901- ) did the same thing by painting connotation Christian art symbols when he took this leap from his old surrealism to his new mysticism. In one period of his work the Christian symbols are painted using their connotative effect, rather than verbalized, as in the new theology. But this makes no difference. It is based on a leap, and an

illusion of communication is given by using the connotative effect of the Christian symbols (pg. 247-248, Schaeffer)."

Response to comment [from a Christian]: "The difference is that I am referring to art as a verb: an activity that people engage in. You are using the term art as an adjective: as an aggrandizing description of some other activity."

Use art form in a sentence.
Should all people have the same social or professional status?

Do you resent others who have a higher position or more wealth?

Jas 3:14-15

"...Sculpture is a traditional art form. Theater is a traditional art form. "Form", meaning a form used for the purpose of artistic expression."

You prefer a more traditional use of the word artist. You're ok with the term if it is used in conjunction with a: sculptor, painter, theater actor, dancer, etc.

Fair enough.

[To member] "What is it that you aren't understanding?

Art is a specific human activity. That activity is the deliberate expression of the artist's vision and experience of being through the creation of an art object. That has been the purpose of art since the dawn of mankind. People make all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, but when they make these things for this specific reason it's called art..."

Response to comment [from a Christian]: "Haven't read through this whole thread, so my apologies, folks, if this has been mentioned already...

This is a true work of art."

You have posed the most germane question to PureX. His stance on so many issues bespeaks an envious nature.

...I suppose artists should be flattered that people use their endeavor as a way of positively aggrandizing other endeavors, but in doing so I think it diminished the uniqueness of the actual artistic endeavor...

We use terms like: art form, work of art or artistry to express an appreciation for a variety of skills and abilities. Jas 1:17