Art Theory: BVA 313 - 22/10/2019 (Research - Final organisation on word form)
These researches and theoretical texts are a collection of investigation within a week before the project due date. The sudden realization of similarity between my research paper and theory paper allows me to try and focus on a new topic.
- will be written into my powerpoint presentation.
Art Theory
(Bacchilega, 2002) Bacchilega, C. (2002). Fairy tales transformed? : Twenty-first-century adaptations and the politics of wonder. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com
Definition of Contemporary art
1) Appropriation
The tension between politics and aesthetics can be ascribed to the relation between authority and authorship. What is the political role of art? Could a particular theory of authorship in art present and demonstrate an alternative notion of political authority?
The critic Peter Burger stated that the modernist avant-garde loathed the idea of art as an autonomous sphere of production,
They asserted that the values of their art should become the values of their culture, indicating their utopian aim to organise society from a basis in art.
** Barthes rethinking the definition of human being after years of western autonomous shere of production.
However, artistic projects that deal with the sphere of human relations often suffer from the naïve assumption that interaction and participation automatically result in valuable and equal human social relationships.
the artists who design the collaborative networks are involved in the authorship of the work but they are not the primary author; they facilitate the inter-subjective relationships between the participants, which form the central artistic content of the work. The authorship is distributed among everyone who participated in the creation of a social network and helped to generate new terrain of the common.
However, can a reproduction of something doesn’t equal an ownership of an artwork?
The challenge of identifying the ‘author’ of a work in cases where there are multiple
1contributions has long been an issue for copyright.
Art theoriest: Arthur Danto and especially George Dickie
As Dickie explains in an exposition of his theory: contributions has long been an issue for copyright.
“Traditional theories of art place works of art within simple and narrowly-focused
networks of relations ... for example ... a two-place network of artist and work. The
institutional theory attempts to place the work of art within a multi-placed network of
greater complexity than anything envisaged by the various traditional theories. The
networks of contexts of the traditional theories are too ‘thin’ to be sufficient. The
institutional theory attempts to provide a context which is ‘thick’ enough to do the job”
** rethinking a set of copyright rules concerning joint authorship
By situating authorship in the ‘artworld’, relational theories provide copyright with concepts for forging correspondence between notions of joint authorship in law and art. As has been shown elsewhere, copyright’s tests of joint authorship often bear little relation to social understandings of who ‘counts’ as an author13 and, in the realm of art, such connections are important to ensure the law’s legitimacy
Anne Barron has argued… copyright is often justified by the goal of encouraging the promotion of the arts and its legitimacy therefore rests with the efficacy of its response to the ‘claims of art.’14
Definition of art based on authorship:
as avant-garde art ‘has consistently and intentionally produced objects and performances that challenge settled conceptions about what one is likely to encounter on a visit to a gallery, a theater [sic] or a concert hall.
Example: Marcel Duchamp 1917 a urinal entitled Fountain
R. Mutt challenged existing theories the romantic assumption of art as a product of ‘individual acts of origination,’
George Dickie has developed a number of works, an explicitly institutional theory of art. The most recent of Dickie’s theory stated ‘a work of art is an artefact of some kind created to be presented to an artworld public.
Listed into 4 categories:
an artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of an artwork; [2] a public is a set of persons who are prepared in some degree to understand an object that is presented to them; [3] an artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public; [4] the artworld is the totality of all artworld systems. Implicit in these definitions is the claim that artists’ intentions are in some sense relevant to the classification of their works as art.
What makes the art of an artist really his/hers?
Seems like everything has been invented. There are no original, new inventions …. SO how can be claim authorship over anything????
A great example to introduce is Richard Prince with his series of artwork, “New Portraits”, which was based on screenshots of other people’s Insta accounts and then printed it on a canvas.
According to experts at Moma, the intentional borrowing, copying, and alteration of preexisting images and objects, has been a legitimate instrument of expression for over a century. Tate Gallery traces the practice back to Dadaism, which was an art movement of the 20th century European avant-garde that had political affinities with the radical left and was also anti-bourgeois. One of the key figures of the movement was Marcel Duchamp, (similar to the journal above, using Duchamp as an artist model towards the issue on authorship.)
Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades:
Duchamp, readymade
His work was undergone in a process called “retinal art”, art that was only visual. By simply choosing the object and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it. ** The criteria for selecting the pieces was “Visual indifference, and the selections reflect his sense of irony, humor and ambiguity”
**Going back to Richard, he re-photographed advertisements such as the one for Marlboro cigarettes or photo-journalism shots. His work took anonymous and ubiquitous cigarette billboard advertising campaigns, elevated the status and focused the gaze on the images. (different perceptive at different time era)
Left: Jim Krantz, Right: Richard Prince (Marlbolo advertisement)
2) Incorporating fairy tale into contemporary art works.
The 21 artists featured in Dread & Delight: Fairy Tales in an Anxious World, create artwork on Fairytale story by Grimm brothers, like Cinderella. Not to mention Disney incorporate the fairy tale story too.
Centuries-old stories take on new relevance in these multimedia works: artists explore contemporary social issues by deconstructing and reassembling imagery from tales like Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. They go beyond dispelling the myth of a helpless princess waiting to be rescued from her tower; racism, sexism, poverty, and LGBTQ inequality are among the cast of shadowy villains depicted here.
In the exhibition catalog, curator Emily Stamey defines fairy tales as “wonder tales that originated in oral folk traditions,” and notes that “many of the artists whose work is featured in Dread & Delight may not have been familiar with these early iterations, yet their work often resonates deeply with their more troublesome content and tone.”
Definition of Fairy tales
(Bacchilega, 2002)
Fairy tale reflects to its contemporary genre, affected by social force.
Fairy tale are also based on the issue arising on its particular era
Adaptation of fairy tale story.
Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation pg 32
that “any text is an intertext” 2 means, first of all, approaching adaptation as one of the many forms of rewriting we encounter in a text— quotation, collage, palimpsest, parody, translation, and so on.
This approach suggests thinking of adaptation as a practice that weaves multiple texts with one another, translating them across media and audiences, connecting them not only intertextually but also hypertextually.
Example: The title of Angela Carter’s short story, “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost: Three Versions in One Story”. Carter’s adaptation works to question the “innocent heroine” portrayal of Cinderella and the fantasy of an upward heterosexual marriage that Charles Perrault as well as the 1950 Disney movie popularized. Because her fiction weaves other “Cinderella” intertexts together, whether Carter’s readers have read Basile or the Grimms is not essential to perceiving it as an adaptation.
There is no “original” or single hypotext in Carter’s “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost: Three Versions in One Story” because the fairy tale circulates as a text that is already plural
.
**Example of film
Recent fairy tale films seem to thrive on blurring the boundaries of and raising questions about the relationship between fantasy and reality. (PG109)
Ever After:
in 1998, film Ever After (director Joe Andy Tennant), the heroine’s self-proclaimed graet-great-granddaughter states: While Cinderella and her prince did live happily ever after, the point, gentlemen, is that she lived.” Bringing closure to the tale she has just told the two men identified as the Brothers Grimm, she reinforces this assertion by producing material evidence: not only a Leonardo portrait that is possibly of her Cinderella ancestor, but also another precious heirloom, the heroine’s ornate and “real “glass shoe.
Charles Perrault :
Charles Perrault’s glass slippers lose their magic perhaps in that scene, but their material presence on screen adds to the realism that has inflected the noblewoman’s telling of “Cinderella” not as a fairy tale but as family history, or, at the very least, legend. This Cinderella is a larger-than-life figure— an active, educated, willful, and flawed woman— with whom the teller proudly associates herself, and one whom, presumably, girls at the end of the twentieth century would not dismiss as an outdated fantasy. 2
Disney’s Cinderella:
Cathy Lynn Preston discussed popular -culture context of contemporary fairy tale jokes, TV shows, and folk criticism. Ever after as an “American popular culture production of the Cinderella tale that Successfully blurs the boundaries between folktale and legend in an attempt to retrieve the romantic possibilities of true lobe for the generation currently raised in the aftermath/afterglow of second-wave feminism and post-Marxist critique”
More specifically, Preston suggests that the film’s combining of “the shift in genre from fairy tale to legend” with “a shift in gender patterns” is a response to “the last thirty years of feminist critique of gender construction in respect to key Western European popularized versions of the fairy tale (in particular those of Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Disney)”
Page 7:
According to Goffman (1974) individuals rely on “primary frameworks” which help them to classify new information based on shared understanding of how a society works (p. 24).
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Classification of fairy tales
Fairy tales also differ in plot and structure from their folktale counterparts. In fact, there are two major subsections in which a fairy tale can fall into: restoration fairy tales, or rise fairy tales.
Page 12
The second most common fairy tale substructure is that of the rise fairy tale. “Rise fairy tales begin with a dirt-poor girl or boy who suffered effects of grinding poverty and whose story continues with tests, tasks, and trials until magic brings about a marriage to royalty and a happy accession to great wealth” (Bottigheimer, 2009, p. 12). Fritzsche (2012) said “these fairy tales indicate a socialization process and acquisition of values for participation in a society where the protagonist has more power of determination,” meaning that the character undergoes different trials to bring him/her from one social standing to the next level (p. 57).
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Contemporary Literary Adaptations: Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm Since Yeh-Shen, Cinderella stories had been told and written in countries around the world. The versions most familiar to Western and American audiences are from Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Perrault wrote his variation of Cinderella (The Little Glass Slipper) in 1697. This was said to have been the greatest influence for Disney’s 1950 animated Cinderella (Kelley, 1994).
Example of Contemporary Visual Artists : Dread and Delight Art exhibition. Natalie Frank (Yau, 2015)
Viewership:
Visual art is an artwork that appeals primarily to the visual sense and typically exists in permanent form, such as traditional plastic art (drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking) and modern visual art like photography, video,filmmaking, computer art etc.) as well as architecture, design and crafts.
The term public art refers actually to works of art in any media that have been designed and
performed with the specific intention of being sited or staged in physical public domain
, usually external and accessible to all.
The notion “public art’, as an alternative to elite gallery art, emerged in 1960s, and its aim was to revitalise urban space. Gradually, the most characteristic feature of public art became an opportunity to express current issues and to communicate with its exposition places and its recipients.
America
Interacting between the artist and the public. Reflecting on situation too. One of the biggest influences of public art was the effect it had on the general public, who for the first time felt power to exercise over their surroundings and city spaces.
Richard Serra, commissioned by United States General Services Administration for their Arts in Architecture program, work installed “Tilted Arc” was received negatively in the public as citizen said it was too gaudy and distracted them from view of other building. But The artist intention was to give the viewer a special significance of the space and to appreciate the changes the public feels when walking around the site-specific sculpture.
Another example, Bronz Bronzes by John Ahearn 1991. Ahearn created these figures based on real people he had met and represented the local community, the public thought otherwise. However, People thought the images the artist had created stereotyped people of the Bronx in racially offensive ways, particularly to the African American community
This indicates that the public and the artist need to have similar perceptions for the artwork to be accepted by the community.
After some fail experimentation on exhibiting public art at public space.
artworks include Please Touch the Art in Brooklyn Bridge Park by Jeppe Hein in 2016, which was a successful interactive public art installation supported by New York’s Public Art Fund. The name of the artwork, Please Touch the Art, suggests that the art needs to be touched and experimented with as people walk past the artworks. This feature included fountains, mirror installations and interactive seating. Such interactive public art has grown as a way to bring people together while enhancing the city’s public spaces.
Definition of reception theory:
Reception (Kinoshita, 2004)
Theory as “a general shift in concern from the author and the work to the text and the reader.”1
Reception towards public art
Public art is in this relation often regarded or exploited as a tool that could help increase the distinctiveness, uniqueness and attractiveness of cities and consequently provide work for the local economic base
By the term public art we refer to works of art in any form that have been designed and performed with the specific intention of being sited or staged in physical public domain, usually external and accessible to all
History is full of examples where city authorities intentionality supported art in order to gain competitive advantages, measured either in the form of reputation, prestige or simply by enhancing the attractiveness over similar cities. Maybe the best known examples of such enhancing of physical i.e. “cultural capital in materialised form” (Bourdieu, 1986) are the cities of the so-called “grand tour”, a traditional trip of historical European cities in 18th century undertaken by mainly upper-class European young people, which is well represented in novels like “A room with a view”
Januchta-Szostak (2010: 83) enlist three means by which public art can achieve social integration:
One of them is social engagement and collaboration on cultural projects.
Public art thus includes the dimension of ‘temporality’ i.e. how long is its duration in the city and ‘empathy’ or how much and what kind of (social) integration is achieved between public art and various city users.
all cities in the world are experiencing some level of cultural globalization, which is constantly inserting new cultural elements into the city space.
When analysing the role of public art in a city it is important to stress that different audiences or city users have different needs and different views towards how should public art be inserted in the urban space. (Chooses SIT Library as my work encourages the positive attribution of cultural diversity)
Suggested, these seven areas to be addressed by public art include: 1) developing a sense of community; 2) developing a sense of place; 3) developing civic identity; 4) addressing community needs; 5) tackling social exclusion; 6) implementing educational value and 7) promoting social change.
Contemporary Art: (Harris, 2011)
Works Cited
Biron, L., & Cooper, E. (2015, October 13). Authorship, aesthetics and the artworld: reforming copyright’s joint authorship doctrine. Retrieved from University of Glasgow : http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/111076/7/111076.pdf
Dupont, H. (2015, December 5). If the shoe fits: An analysis of historical and contemporary adaptations of Cinderella. . Retrieved from BridgeWater State University : https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1091&context=honors_proj
Funderburk, A. (2019, Obtober 22). Artist reinterpret classic fairy tales, from Rapunzel to Snow White . Retrieved from Hyperallergic : https://hyperallergic.com/465883/artists-reinterpret-classic-fairy-tales-from-rapunzel-to-snow-white/
Harris, J. (2011). Globalization and contemporary art . UK: Wiley-Blackwell .
Jagannath, T. (2018, March 24). The significance of public art to its space: People's spaces, people's choice. Retrieved from newgeaography: https://www.newgeography.com/content/005916-the-significance-public-art-its-space-people-s-spaces-people-s-choices
Januchta-Szostak, A. (2010, January ). The role of Public Visual Art in Urban space recognition . Retrieved from Research Gate : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221906896_The_Role_of_Public_Visual_Art_in_Urban_Space_Recognition
Kinoshita. (2004, November 4). Reception Theory . Retrieved from http://www.yumikinoshita.com/receptiontheory.pdf
Lazic, S. (2017, July 25). Authorship in Art - The victim of Appropriation. Retrieved from WideWalls: https://www.widewalls.ch/authorship-in-art/
Rapaport, B. K. (2015, June 27). Art in Public Space. Retrieved from The New York Times : https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opinion/sunday/art-in-public-spaces.html
Staff in Art. (2016, September 06). Richard Prince: The Controversial Artist and Master of Appropriation. Retrieved from Highsnobiety : https://www.highsnobiety.com/2016/09/05/richard-prince-artist/
Ursic, M. (n.d.). 'City as a work of art' - Influence of publuc art in the city . Retrieved from http://www.theatrefit.org/perch/resources/art-in-the-city-bunker-2014-ursic.pdf
Woods, A. (2014, November 4). Common Authorship: Towards and Authority of Art. Retrieved from Metamodernism : https://www.metamodernism.com/2014/11/04/common-authorship-towards-an-authority-of-art/
Yau, J. (2015, May 31). Natalie frank delivers the news from Never-Never land . Retrieved from Hyperallergic : https://hyperallergic.com/210210/natalie-frank-delivers-the-news-from-never-never-land/
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