Art Auction India

Until recently, the word “modern” used to refer generically to the contemporaneous; all art is modern at the time it is made. In his Libra dcll’Artc (translated as “The Craftsman’s Handbook”) in 1437 Cennino Cennini explains that Giotto made painting ”modern”. Giorgio Vasari writing in sixteenth-century Italy refers to the art of his own period as “modern.” Modernism in art is used as a term.

As an art historical term, “modern” refers to a period dating from roughly the 1860s through the 1970s and is used to describe the style and the ideology of art produced during that era. It is this more specific use of modern that is intended when people speak of modern art. The term “modernism” is also used to refer to the art of the modern period. More specifically, “modernism” can be thought of as referring to the philosophy of modern art.

In her book of the same title, Suzi Gablik asks “Has Modernism Failed?” Does she mean “failed” simply in the sense of coming to an end? Or does she mean that Modernism failed to accomplish something? The presupposition of the latter is that modernism had goals, which it failed to achieve. What were these goals?

For reasons that will become clear later, the question of modernism has been couched largely in formal terms. Art historians speak of modern art as concerned primarily with essential qualities of colour and flatness and as exhibiting over time a reduction of interest in subject matter. It is generally agreed that’ Edouard Manet is the first modernist painter, and that modernism in art originated in the 1860s. Paintings such as his Le Dejeuner sur I’herbe are seen to have ushered in the era of modernism. But the question can be posed: Why did Manet paint Le Dejeuner sur I’herbe? The standard answer is: Because he was interested in exploring new subject matter, new painterly values and spatial relationships. But, there is another more interesting question beyond this: Why was Manet exploring new subject matter, new painterly values and spatial relationships? He produced a modernist painting in action oil on canvas.

All Art is a literary technique of art painting which principally ridicules its subject (individuals, organizations, states) often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. In Celtic societies, it was thought a bard’s satire could have physical effects, similar to a curse. A satirist is one who satirizes.

Art is not exclusive to any viewpoint. Parody is a form of humor that imitates another work of art painting in an exaggerated fashion for comic effect, usually deriding the subject of the parody in the process. Although the techniques of satire and parody often overlap, they are not synonymous. Satires need not be humorous — indeed, they are often tragic – while parodies are almost inevitably humorous. Parodies are imitative by definition, while satires need not be. Humorous satires often base the humor on the juxtaposition between the satire and reality. The main intent of satire is political, social, or moral and not comic. The humor of such a satire tends to be subtle, using irony and deadpan humor liberally.

Diminution: Reduces the size of something in order that it may be made to appear ridiculous or in order to be examined closely and have its faults seen close up. For example, treating the Canadian Members of Parliament as a squabbling group of little boys is an example of diminution. The first portion of Gulliver’s Travels, set in the fictitious land of Liliput, is a diminutive satire. A common technique of satire is to take a real-life situation and exaggerate it to such a degree that it becomes ridiculous and its faults can be seen, and thus satirical. For example, two boys arguing over a possession of a car can be inflated into an interstellar war. The Rape of the Lock is an example of inflation.

Juxtaposition: Places things of unequal importance side by side. It brings all the things down to the lowest level of importance on the list. For example, if a guy says his important subjects in school include Calculus, Computer Science, Physics, and Girl-watching, he has managed to take away some of the importance of the first three. The Rape of the Lock is also an example of juxtaposition.

The philosophers tell us that art consists essentially, not in performing a moral act, but in making a thing, a work, m making an object with a view not to the human good of the agent, but to the exigencies and the proper good of the object to be made, and by employing ways of realization predetermined by the nature of the object in question.

Art thus appears as something foreign in itself to the sphere of the human good, almost as something inhuman, and whose exigencies nevertheless are absolute: for, needless to say, there are not two ways of making an object well, of realizing well the work one has conceived—there is but one way, and it must not be missed.

The philosophers go on to say that this making activity is principally and above all an intellectual activity. Art is a virtue of the intellect, of the practical intellect, and may be termed the virtue proper to working reason.

But then, you will say, if art is nothing other than an intellectual virtue of making, whence comes its dignity and its ascendancy among us? Why does this branch of our activity draw to it so much human sap? Why has one always and in all peoples admired the poet as much as the sage?

It may be answered first that to create, to produce something intellectually, to make an object rationally constructed, is something very great in the world: to man this alone is already a way of imitating God. And I am speaking here of art in general, such as the ancients understood it—in short, of art as the virtue of the artisan.

But where the maker of works especially becomes an imitator of God, where the virtue of art approaches the nobility of things absolute and self-sufficient, is in that family of arts which by itself alone constitutes a whole spiritual world, namely the fine arts.

There are two things to be considered here. On the one hand, whatever the nature and the utilitarian ends of the art envisaged, it participates by its object in something superhuman, since it has as its object to create beauty

Where modernists hoped to unearth universals or the fundamentals of art, postmodernism aims to unseat them, to embrace diversity and contradiction. A postmodern approach to art thus rejects the distinction between low and high art forms. It rejects rigid genre boundaries and favors eclecticism, the mixing of ideas and forms. Partly due to this rejection, it promotes parody, irony, and playfulness, commonly referred to as jouissance by postmodern theorists. Unlike modern art, postmodern art does not approach this fragmentation as somehow faulty or undesirable, but rather celebrates it. As the gravity of the search for underlying truth is relieved, it is replaced with ‘play’. As postmodern icon David Byrne, and his band Talking Heads said: ‘Stop making sense.’.

Post-modernity, in attacking the perceived elitist approach of Modernism, sought greater connection with broader audiences. This is often labelled accessibility’ and is a central point of dispute in the question of the value of Postmodern art. It has also embraced the mixing of words with art, collage and other movements in modernity, in an attempt to create more multiplicity of medium and message. Much of this centers on a shift of basic subject matter: postmodern artists regard the mass media as a fundamental subject for art, and use forms, tropes, and materials—such as banks of video monitors, found art, and depictions of media objects—as focal points for their art. Andy Warhol is an early example of postmodern art in action, with his appropriation of common popular symbols and “ready-made” cultural artifacts, bringing the previously mundane or trivial onto the previously hallowed ground of high art.

Postmodernism’s critical stance is interlinked with presenting new appraisals of previous works. As implied above the works of the “Dada” movement received greater attention, as did collagists such as Robert Rauschenberg, whose works were initially considered unimportant in the context of the modernism of the 1950s, but who, by the 1980s, began to be seen as seminal. Post-modernism also elevated the importance of cinema in artistic discussions, placing it on a peer level with the other fine arts.This is both because of the blurring of distinctions between “high” and “low” forms, and because of the recognition that cinema represented the creation of simulacra which was later duplicated in the other arts.