Thursday, September 13, 2007

Styles, Movements and Conceptualism

The view has been expressed that everything has been accomplished in the realm of painting and that movements and mainfestos are no longer valid. 'Style' in painting, nevertheless, persists and can refer to the distinctive visual elements, techniques and methods that typify an individual artist's work or to a movement or school that an artist is associated with. Style can originate with an actual group that the artist was involved with or it can be a category in which art historians have placed the painter. The word used in this last sense has fallen out of favour among scholastics, though it continues to be used in popular contexts.

It used to be considered that art arose from dedication to learning the elements of painting, design, colour theory and the like. So-called "modern art" and "contemporary art" have moved away from the historic value of craft and documentation of nature in favour of concept. Effectively, this places the operation of painting in the hands of workmen rather than the artist. The repeated assertion of conceputalists has not prevented the majority of artists from continuing to practise in a somewhat traditional manner. Arguments over what constitutes art and its realation to craft have been forwarded by the modern and post modern schools.

Here is how Wikipedia sees the divisions of the art world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painting

Sunday, September 9, 2007

The Painter's Directory

...complex systems seem to strike a balance between the need for order and and the imperative to change. Complex systems tend to locate themselves at a place we call "the edge of chaos." We imagine the edge of chaos as a place where there is enough innovation to keep a living system vibrant and enough stability to keep if from collapsing into anarchy. It is a zone of conflict and upheaval, where the old and the new are constantly at war, Finding the balance point must be a delicate matter - if a living system drifts too close, it risks falling over into incoherence and dissolution; but if the system moves too far away from the edge, it becomes rigid, frozen, totalitarian. Both conditions lead to extinction. Too much change is as destructive as too little. Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish,

Michael Crichton

While the above was written with respect to the evolution and pending decline of human societies it works almost as well as a model for the evolution of the so-called "arts" and the "crafts"