These are the slides that introduce the class on the measurement of art – ‘Sciencing Art’ so to speak. I am too distracted by other subjects to work on this now, though I’ve outlined the course and would love to teach it.
So for those who (frequently) as what is art and how do we measure it and how do we learn about it from measuring it, then this is enough of a foundation to starat with.
ART
If you want to define art: it’s evidence of the mind and hand of man meant to externalize and ‘decorate’ the world in the broadest terms, which converts the alien and foreign to the personal and relatable.
In that sense, in the broadest sense, art is domestication of the world into something more desirable by man, provoking more attention and emotion from man. If you mean can we separate craft, from decoration, from design, from representation, from meaning then, yes we can. And a number of other dimensions as well. We externalize our selves into the world, and in that we make the world more suitable to us, by our actions, by our works, by our crafts, by our arts. And unlike those things that don’t persist, our handiworks do. And often outlive us.
In the most mundane evolutionary sense, art is nesting behavior applied to tool-making behavior, applied to mark-making behavior – satisfying a primal intuition for safety in familiarity.
Cheers
