I didn't know that about Kandinsky. Interesting. Synesthesia is a wide range of unusual perceptions rather than simply the ability to visualize sound. I feel sound physically. My mother perceived numbers as color. Someone else told me that she heard color and once had to leave an art exhibit because it was so loud it made her feel ill.
We're seeing what the artist sees when he perceives sound. I wonder if he was listening to music at the time.
I was at an outdoor restaurant with a friend of mine who's an artist. We were sitting next to a patchwork of wiring that ran up the outside of the building next to our table.... electric wires, telephone wires, cable wires. I found it most interesting, and asked him if it was art. Clearly people made it, and laid the wires in a deliberate way. "No," he said, "it's not art." He explained that the people who laid the pattern weren't thinking of how the pattern would be perceived, but only of how functional the pattern would be. Similarly people see beauty in the sinuous circuit patterns of a printed circuit board, but the creator of that pattern had only function in mind, and might see beauty only in the elegance of using a minimum of connections to do the job. "If I took a picture of that wall and printed it, would it now be art?" I asked my friend. "Yes," he said, "because it would not only be an arrangement of things, but your next step in conveying your perception of those things, exactly as if I had painted them and hung the painting on the wall." It's an interesting take on the subject. When an artist paints a still life of a bowl of fruit or something, it's clear that there's been a deliberate arrangement of the subject by the artist, and that arrangement is what the artist conveys. Similarly, a photograph of a leaf or a landscape represents what the photographer chooses to see in the viewfinder, and what aspects of the photograph are enhanced through darkroom magic or Photoshop or whatever. So there has to be not only a perception of the subject but a conveyance of what the artist saw and felt when that subject became the medium.
@JLT That's more or less how Copyright law in the U.S. addresses the issue. Copyright applies to creative works. You can't use copyright to cover utilitarian features of a useful item. To the extent there is only function, and not some sort of creative aspect that can be viewed independently from the underlying item, there is no copyright. Also similarly to what your friend said, a photograph of that wall would be covered by copyright in the U.S. largely for the reasons he stated.
So consider this: I go to a certain place and take a picture of Mount Rushmore. Somebody else takes a picture from that exact same space and takes a picture of the same thing. When the two pictures are laid side by side, it's impossible to tell them apart. So which picture can be copyrighted? Both of them? Neither of them?
In the U.S., they'd both have copyright. A copyright does not protect against independent creation. If you wrote a poem and someone else independently wrote the same poem, word for word, you'd both have copyright, but I can see a lot of difficulty arising in terms of enforcement, licensing etc. Patent law requires 'novelty.' The invention has to be new. Copyright law has no such requirement. (Speaking at all times about U.S. law).
Very well said. There's a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to artists and their intentions. Many books have been written about the subject. In Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study, author Paisley Livingstone argues "for an account that recognizes the multiple functions fulfilled by intentions in the lives of temporally situated agents who deliberate over what to do, settle on ends and means, and try to realize some of their plans." https://academic.oup.com/book/2073 The question then becomes: Does artistic value depend on the artist's skillful accomplishment of their intentions?
@JLT As stated by a famous U.S. judge, Learned Hand, in 1924: ""[T]he law imposes no prohibition upon those who, without copying, independently arrive at the precise combination of words or notes which have been copyrighted." Stated another way, "If A produces identically the same work as B, by independent thought, in good faith, without hearing, or seeing, B's work, both A and B would be entitled to individual copyrights in their individual works."
So it comes down to whether the second work is arrived at independently of the first, right? And that can be tricky to determine. When I took that picture of Mount Rushmore, the second guy saw me standing at that spot. He selected his vantage point based on my selection; it was not "independently arrived at." Of course, he could have argued that his was an independent creation, since he didn't know what my camera settings were, and made his own decision about F-stops and shutter speeds and such. This is what makes lawyers rich.
I’d argue that’s still an independent creation but I’m not aware of a case like that and ultimately it would be up to a judge or jury to decide (i.e. money for lawyers). In the U.S., independent creation is generally hard to prove.
Just in case we didn't have enough to debate already... The photo one takes of Mt. Rushmore through the frame of the tunnel may be the personal work of the photographer, but how original is a photograph that is essentially duplicated by 300,000 tourists every single year? Unless there is something unique in the composition that makes one's own photo stand out from all others, it's just one more run of the mill tourist photo.
Given the popularity of that particular framing device, that photographer might be lucky to get a dollar and a half in fees for somebody who wants to use it. In fact, the editor could probably find one in the public domain and use it for free.
Anna Weyant (born 1995) is a Canadian New York City–based artist whose figurative paintings blend influence from the Dutch Golden Age with an awareness of contemporary popular culture and social media. Summertime (2020)
Based in Urbana, Illinois, the artist Adrian Gottlieb (b. 1975) has been highly regarded in the world of contemporary realism for almost two decades. Lucretia
William Holbrook Beard (April 13, 1824 – February 20, 1900) was an American artistic painter who is known best for his satirical paintings of animals performing human-like activities. The Bear Dance (c. 1870)
The life we live is the definition and the Art is the life we live. Just like life, we all have our own personal perspectives on it and We a Sounds cheesy, but art is the many perspectives of the life we live.
Which is the point my artist friend was trying to convey, I think. Art is the process of conveying that perspective of life to another person so that they may share that perspective with you. Jackson Pollack's dribbles were deliberate, conscious choices of what paint to put where. In each painting, he's telling us "That's where I want that particular piece of paint to be." That's what made it art. People can debate endlessly about whether it's good or bad art, but it's what makes his work different from a random splash of paint on a surface, such as you might find on an artist's drop cloth. BTW, I saw my friend the other day and we discussed that very topic. He said that he hasn't changed his mind.
