The Importance Of Visual Art

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People talk about the art of things like medicine and cooking, or even war, but though those things require skill and knowledge and can be done with flair, they are not art in the true sense of what is considered visual art. When I speak of visual art I am referring to paintings, carvings, sculptures. My definition is aimed specifically at art that we collect, exhibit in museums, and in our homes. I am referring to the 2-dimensional and 3- dimensional, visual arts. Those that are crafted by an artisan to represent an idea or an object. Just because someone calls something art does not make it art. Art can involve found objects or manufactured objects, if they are manipulated in some way or are included in a larger piece that shows not what they were, but what they have become. Marcel Duchamp and other artists who tried to …show more content…

Duchamp's idea that a ready made object that is modified, and I mean truly modified not just signed, could be art does in some ways qualify as art, if and only if the object is incorporated into something that is handmade. To take a manufactured object like the urinal in its original form and call it art doesn’t make it art, but to take a focused object and modify it can make it art because in modifying it you move it from the category of manufactured to the category of handmade. The same can be said of his “In Advance of Broken Arm,” which is simply a snow shovel, or his his “Fresh Window,” which is just a window. Duchamp’s faulty logic included the idea that he believed paint was ready-made, an industrial product, so he was already using ready made or manufactured things in his art. Paint is not the art, it is a tool used to produce the art, and therefore is not significant in the definition of visual art, as an artist can if they really want to be organic make their own paints. The idea that paint is readymade does

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