Creative Acts

Dancing: art work (or not?) by Kat O'Brian, one of her "Seven Shrines"

When I hear a discussion starting about "what is art" I mostly get tired before I have even started to listen or to think about arguments myself. I experience that these kind of discussions can become very "heated" because quite some people consider it a very important question and want to prove the truth in their opinion and I don't think it's worth all that fighting with words. So I get tired but still, I listen secretly to the discussion because in some way I hope to find an acceptable answer to the question myself once. (and by the way, I like the decent and reasonable way of your discussing here:))

Instead of "do I think this is art" I try to ask myself the question if that object called art moves me, so quite like one of the definitions FRH gave. If the answer is positive I tend to call it art for myself but for someone else could find it just a meaningless silly thing. I have a weakness for cute "art", like the picture of the wooden dancing lady I attached.

FRH: "And because most of the art from the early middle ages till 1800 is made as an order by the royal court or the pope, meaning no creativity was used."
I don't know much about art history but I don't believe I agree to this. I think those "sponsors" (what was the specific term again?) were just the only option for artists in that time to do what they really wanted: being creative. In that time there was no government money for these kind of people. So I think it was working in order of a rich person or finding another job. And who says some of those rich people didn't honestly appreciate it? I don't think all of them just wanted paintings of themselves, or am I being too romantic now? Maybe some artists saw it as a good job and had as a goal to "make art" and not "to be creative" like you have nowadays as well.

Now, we haven't yet really talked about a definition for "creativity". With Loesje the Netherlands we have spent about 4 hours discussing about a possible definition once during a member weekend. Very interesting, but not yet satisfying it was. Personally it sometimes irritates me that Loesje spams us with the sentences like "just come and we'll be creative" What is meant with it and does everyone interprets it alike?

~We could not all be cowboys, so some of us are clowns~