Sunday 26 April 2020

The Difference Between Precision and Perfection.

Art is object manipulation uncommon in daily life. I've received many suggestions over the years to slightly alter this definition and this merely shows that it is commonly misunderstood. The key part is that art is defined by the actions of people and not the results of those actions, even if those results are called the artworks. This also indicates why it has proven so difficult to define art by only looking at the artworks, without considering their methods of creation as a primary factor.
For example, take a normal table, made in a normal way. Everything about this table is done the same way that every other table in the world is made, except that it was assembled while the workers were suspended upside from the ceiling. Then a reasonable argument could be made that this table is an artwork.
It's probably bad art because you can't ultimately distinguish the final artwork from any other table in the world, but that's a different question. 


Update on the 3rd of October, 2020:
At the 4th edition of KölnSkulptur, the bi-yearly exhibition at the synonymous sculpture park in Cologne, Andreas Slominski installed a sculpture that was a simple field of bricks in the shape of a car parking spot, with a car parked on it, placed perpendicular against the walking path in the park.
From their website:
'Now comes this cunningly simple Der Parkplatz, almost crazy, given the elaborate working process it involved. For the paving was first only laid round the edges, and was then completed by a workman lying under the car. But the absurdity of the relationship of his works - such as Tierfallen - to their titles, ultimately leads to the question, "What is art?" The same question as is posed - not without irony - by his installations and performances.'