art matters

... was the name of my first "art history" class as a college freshman. (Yes, it was required. Duh.) And we didn't really study art history very much; we didn't study much in that class period, but that's neither here nor there. The curriculum was more devoted to how one writes about a piece of art, how analyzing an artwork is different from, say, analyzing a book, and long, painful and ultimately fruitless discussions on the immortal question: What is Art? As a graduate from the same college, I can tell you that I've had that discussion in many other, similarly painful forms over the course of my four-year tenure and the result of that discussion is always the same: There is no answer; picking an answer from philosophers, or classmates, or just at random merely creates more questions that need to be addressed. It's nightmarish.

Ideas of beauty come up in this discussion- a lot of people consider the physical aesthetic quality of an object to be a criterion for whether or not the object can be considered "art." Umberto Eco looks at iconic film stars and how they fit into "the aesthetic ideal" in a way that has me recalling all those questions. (He doesn't answer it either- unless he has some startling revelations in the rest of the essay not available on the Guardian.)

via dust from a distant sun