It's All Art (except that)

The last couple of days, I've been spending a lot of time in the park with Danto's After The End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. It is an interesting read, and slightly less complicated than the title suggests. It has, however, brought my attention (back) to the idea that anything and everything could potentially be art.

There are many variations on this particular theme that keep spinning around in my pretty little head, and I won't get into them all now; it's 2.26 am and I should be asleep. What's keeping me up tonight is the definition of the term "art".

After reading a couple of chapters, I notice that all the examples used are either paintings or installations. Typical examples of modern art. Perhaps it isn't too strange for someone writing about art to use such typical examples. What interests me is the examples he doesn't use. It seems many of the disciplines of the arts are excluded. What about poetry, for example? Music? Drama, literature, architecture? In older texts, these are more or less given, yet I've realized that I, too, don't immediately associate music, or literature for that matter, with the term "Art".

There is of course the possibility that I am an exception, that I wasn't properly taught the nature of art when I was a child, or that I misunderstood what I was taught (I was never a particularly bright child). But maybe, just maybe, the stereotypes I have been considering to be art - painting, installation, obscure nonsensical items that resemble nothing at all and symbolize the decline of mankind, the evil of capitalism, the evil of communism, the moral corruption of society, or the artist's feelings about something, isn't exclusively my own misconceptions. And no, I don't know why I say that, OF COURSE it is all in my head.

Anyway. I just thought it was curious that, since art has developed in such a way that everything is allowed and anything could be art, disciplines that used to be a naturally included in the term "ART" are not anymore. They have become separate disciplines in their own right, with their own theories and histories, and though I don't think this specialization is necessarily a bad thing, it does make me wonder what's left of the arts as such, and what its place is in modern society.

I should mention that everything I just mentioned that used to be a part of the arts is now parts of what we know as "culture".
Including art.

Young Woman Blues (at the magazine shelf)

A couple of weeks ago, I bought two magazines.
One was interesting, insightful, well written, and challenging.

The other one was aimed at women my age.

This is something I've been brewing on for a while now. I felt insulted to have paid £3,50 for something I felt, in a nutshell, to be a collection of meaningless sentences arranged around some photographs. For every page I turned to see the same nonsense - clothes, celebrities wearing clothes, some mention of health and quite a bit about relationships and sex - I felt just a little bit more insulted. Not merely because the information was so incredibly trivial - I was expecting that - what really got to me was the fact that it somehow didn't seem to add anything new.

I read to get new impressions. A unique point of view, perhaps, or new information, or just to escape from reality altogether. I certainly don't read to confirm something I could quite easily derive at myself through pure reasoning. Take this example: "Your man suddenly stops texting you. He's probably not that into you." Which, by the way, is not directly quoted from anything, and I'm sure I've come across it more than once. I'm also pretty sure it is usually the answer to a question that goes something like: "He suddenly stopped texting, has he lost interest?"

Yes, this answers itself.
Most likely.

Unless the woman is overanalyzing normal behaviour. I'm not going to generalize here. Not much, anyway. Overanalyzing is something I've been guilty of doing more than once myself. I have worried unnecessarily more than once, because I've failed to see the obvious explanations. I'm not even going to try to blame this one on the media, because although I read girls' mags as a young teen, I never truly took them to heart. Nonetheless, I think there is an issue with the way men are represented in media aimed at women.

At best, all the thoughts and emotional range of men appear to be represented by one man, or a small group. At worst, men are presented as aliens or animals. They will relate to you. They might love you. They have thoughts and feelings - but not the same thoughts and feelings as us, and must be constantly watched and analyzed.

I may be guilty of occasionally overanalyzing things, but don't come here with the suggestion that men and women share the same emotions or basic reasoning. And if you're trying to tell me every man on the planet can be represented by a group of 5, you've got another thing coming.

By the way, the interesting and intelligent magazine I mentioned at the beginning of this post was the New Scientist magazine. Thought I'd mention it.