Hello, its nice to meet everyone. My name is Rachel Miller-Doyle. I am an anthropology major, with a minor in psychology, and later in education I will be including archeology.
So the question of the day is “what art means to you and what characteristics can you use to identify art?” Well, I’m not sure what art means to you guys, but I know what it means to me. Art to me means emotions, relationships, understanding, as well as many other things. When I think of art the first thing that comes to mind is emotion, not only of the creator and my own emotional reaction, but also the emotion of the piece. A specific art piece will have a significant relationship with either the creator, audience, or even more broadly with a culture that it came from or represents. Art is a way of communicating, sometimes it can be knowledge, experience, emotions, perspective, or all of these together that the artist may have wanted to pass on to someone else. Art is an outlet, in which case the piece could be seen more as a journal page, instead of a letter to prospective audiences. Art has a significant meaning to the artist, a culture, or the audience. Art can be a creation from an educated artist, or a drawing from my seven year old brother. It can be serenely beautiful or terrifyingly ugly. It can cause a mottle mix of emotional reaction, including shock, disgust, or anger. Art has something that is not really tangible or easy to articulate, it’s a feeling, a connection that is formed from observing a piece.
These important characteristics are the foundation for what art means to me, cause you can not have art without them. Basically art is a metaphysical extension of the artist, and that inside every piece of art, the artist gave it something of their selves, to make it more than it was; which is another characteristic of art, making an object more than it was.
I am hoping that I will get an understanding of art in an anthropological perspective. I want to know why some people feel that art is a part of the human condition. I would also like to learn what the academic sense of art is, and how it is represented in different cultures and time.
