So there's this art installation near my workplace.



  • After thinking about this for a while, I think I would define art as "the aspect of creative work that has no physical purpose - that is, its only purpose is to evoke some kind of emotional or intellectual response".

    Distinction is as follows: consider the painting of the Mona Lisa. The painting itself is art, although the canvas, paint, frame, etc. are not. After all, those can be used to block a hole in a wall, or be used as kindling, or bash someone over the head.  But the painting "as a whole" serves no purpose other than to be observed.  "Art" is what is left when you remove the physical embodiment of the thing.

    So annoying abstract art? Yup, it's art.  An automobile with specific styling - the styling is art, the automobile is not.

    Many "works of art" therefore have a combination of functional and emotional elements - but I would only call the emotional elements art; the rest of it is just whatever it is (e.g., a vide game may have art in it, but the game itself isn't art - at least not the pure mechanical bits of it).

    I purposefully left the definition with loopholes - such as what constitutes "a work of art"? Is it any work that contains art, or is it the art itself?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @too_many_usernames said:

    Is it any work that contains art, or is it the art itself?
    I usually require a work of art to contain a purposeful message, even if I don't know what the message is. A pile of twigs isn't art unless someone's looked at it and determined that there is a meaningful message. Some artists try to deny this, but just end up producing stuff that isn't art at all.



  • @dkf said:

    @too_many_usernames said:
    Is it any work that contains art, or is it the art itself?
    I usually require a work of art to contain a purposeful message, even if I don't know what the message is. A pile of twigs isn't art unless someone's looked at it and determined that there is a meaningful message. Some artists try to deny this, but just end up producing stuff that isn't art at all.

    Sorry about diving into stupid pedantic things here but I could see "contain a purposeful message" being problematic when someone declares that the billboard for a fast food chain is art (the message being "eat here").  Of course trying to define things like art are always going to be open to this kind of nit picking as either you limit it to exclude things that you don't feel should be considered art (and thus also remove things that many people consider art) or you leave the definition really really open (and thus let in things that many wouldn't consider art).


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @locallunatic said:

    Sorry about diving into stupid pedantic things here but I could see "contain a purposeful message" being problematic when someone declares that the billboard for a fast food chain is art (the message being "eat here")
    Sometimes the only message is that the “artist” is full of shit.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @locallunatic said:

    Sorry about diving into stupid pedantic things here but I could see "contain a purposeful message" being problematic when someone declares that the billboard for a fast food chain is art (the message being "eat here").  Of course trying to define things like art are always going to be open to this kind of nit picking as either you limit it to exclude things that you don't feel should be considered art (and thus also remove things that many people consider art) or you leave the definition really really open (and thus let in things that many wouldn't consider art).

    The correct definition, of course, is, "I'll know it when I see it."



  • @boomzilla said:

    The correct definition, of course, is, "I'll know it when I see it."

    Fountain



  • Are you talking about right-wing art or left-wing art?



  • Art: now with wings!



  • @dhromed said:

    Someone did that on purpose. I'm sure of it.
    The big cigar



  • @too_many_usernames said:

    After thinking about this for a while, I think I would define art as [bollocks]
     

    slow-motion NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO



  • @flabdablet said:

    Art: now with wings!
     

    Are buffalo wings art?



  • @flabdablet said:

    @dhromed said:
    Someone did that on purpose. I'm sure of it.
    The big cigar
     

    Well, at least that thing looks alright.

    We got something in the middle of a roundabout that looks like a 10000% scaled version of a thing some toddler made with colored paper and lots of glue.



  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dhromed said:

    @flabdablet said:

    Art: now with wings!
     

    Are buffalo wings art?

    Baked or deep fried?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @flabdablet said:

    Abalone capital of the world
    Might as well get these out the way:







  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    At least they clearly have a message. Several in fact. (Typically, one of the messages is that the person who commissioned them is about to become rather less well-humoured than they were previously, but that'll do as a message.)



  • @Mcoder said:

    1 - Why would somebody not want to warm-up a barometer? Barometers at below freezing temperature are hard to handle and not very precise.
    See also: how to use a barometer to measure the height of a building.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Zecc said:

    @Mcoder said:

    1 - Why would somebody not want to warm-up a barometer? Barometers at below freezing temperature are hard to handle and not very precise.
    See also: how to use a barometer to measure the height of a building.

    Which one? Similar triangles, drop it off the side and time how long it takes to hit the ground or bribe the caretaker? (I may have forgotten a couple..)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PJH said:

    @Zecc said:
    See also: how to use a barometer to measure the height of a building.
    Which one? Similar triangles, drop it off the side and time how long it takes to hit the ground or bribe the caretaker? (I may have forgotten a couple..)
    Hang it from some string and measure the variation in oscillation time between the top and the bottom in order to calculate the difference in gravitational field strength, and then calculate the height difference from that.



  • @PJH said:

    Which one? Similar triangles, drop it off the side and time how long it takes to hit the ground or bribe the caretaker? (I may have forgotten a couple..)

    That was the joke in the first episode of the sitcom Head of the Class that proved that everybody in the room thought creatively in a different way. (The ex-hippy substitute teacher proposed the "bribe the building manager" solution.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @PJH said:
    Which one? Similar triangles, drop it off the side and time how long it takes to hit the ground or bribe the caretaker? (I may have forgotten a couple..)

    That was the joke in the first episode of the sitcom Head of the Class that proved that everybody in the room thought creatively in a different way. (The ex-hippy substitute teacher proposed the "bribe the building manager" solution.)


    I though it came from Niels Bohrs. There is a wiki article about it Linky


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