So art is instinct?

I wouldn't reduce this activity to instinct alone, although I agree that instinct plays a major role in the art. These birds are conscious, like humans, they are going through a primitive thinking process and the only difference between this and a human artist producing a work for a human viewer, is the extent of intellectual consideration.

I wouldn't reduce this activity to instinct alone, although I agree that instinct plays a major role in the art. — Punshhh

So that suggests instinct plays a part in human art.

I think there’s something to this instinct issue, that artists are instinctive animals, maybe primitive in their relationship with their surroundings.

Yes instinct is interesting - the definition dose not exclude instinct as it contains subconsciousness but dose it sufficiently account for it ? - this is going to take some thought

My feeling is that those artists at the top of the triangle are very instinctive creatures and quite primitive in their abilities: perceptions, response, connections with history, techniques, etc. Not always nice people either.

After having a smoke.

Its hard to know how big a role instinct plays in human art. No doubt it plays a role.

I think the definition is still valid, but ill try to learn a bit more about human instinct in art.

Other nuances that are not explained in the definition:

Artifact - chance products like unintentional paint splatter

X factor: what you set out to achieve minus what you actually achieve

X factor: what you set out to achieve minus what you actually achieve — Pop

Commonly known as “accidents”. But maybe not so accidental as the opening of the mind to the unexpected, a primitive action by any measure and something that makes all the difference. It means letting go of control, to a degree.

my understanding of consciousness is that it is influenced by psychopathology and biology, so biology would account for instinct.

Here is a painting I finished yesterday, there is more accident in here than you might think, in fact I am mostly taking advantage of happy accidents as I paint. I feel a lot like the Bower Bird.

:up:

That is beautiful mate.

The symmetry of the right and left horse, and the sea-like desert texture, caught my eye.

nice painting punshhh.

Brett yes, but we know that we are imperfect and much of what we produce is not intended and we never produce exactly what we want to - this is the human condition. Yet we continue to produce knowing this will be the result - this is a conscious decision.

Punshhh you are deciding which accidents you keep, and which you correct.

Surely he's using someone else's art(in reference to the bird and nest picture).

Jackson Pollock was a very formal painter many would be surprised to hear. The underlying structure of his work is quite rigid - this allowed him the freedom of splatter. Not total freedom, but he could produce a lot of artifact without compromising his work.

Punshhh you are deciding which accidents you keep, and which you correct.

Yes most of them I keep, for example the white wash over the ripples in the sand in the foreground should be at the other side of the ripples, be done in reverse, a big mistake, but I know from experience it doesn't matter, because the viewer would never know and it works anyway.

Surely he's using someone else's art.

I'm working from two photos I took myself and google images of people riding horses on the same beach, Holkham beach, a famous beach for horse riding. There is hours of the experience of walking the beach and watching the riders myself distilled in some way into the work.

So, if I had thought,"I'm going to do art" the first time and did exactly the same procedure, that first image would have been art? This is a tad more complicated than putting a brush to canvas. In my case the "brush" has a "mind" of its own. — jgill

Right. It's like the difference between accidentally pressing the button on your camera (complicated machine!) and choosing to do so. The camera may be doing much of the "work" (i.e., showing a "mind" of its own), but you're the primary mover.

We have to make that distinction or else you have no way to distinguish art from bird's nests and sunflowers and sunsets.

I actually had a bit of a revelation recently on why I like Monet's haystacks so much, in the middle of thinking through ideas of color, so here it is.

Primary in the perceptible electromagnetic spectra is the color of the chloroplast's photosynthetic mechanism. We are attuned to see this vivid green most of all, because that mechanism is how plants create and sustain all life on the surface of this planet. The hues around the green of growth are therefore most frequently easiest for animals' eyes to see, and nature is therefore dominated by peculiar evolutionary developments, such as flowers and fruits with tones around the color of chloroplasts, to attract and encourage animal life in the most bizarre forms of symbiosis, to propagate the seed of the sedentary plant.

A special wrinkle on perceived color is that objects do not appear to be the same hue and brightness in different lighting conditions, because of their different qualities of light absorption, reflectivity, specularity, opacity, and detail resolution at different distances. If the object also emits light, its color changes under different lighting conditions in an entirely different way, because the primary colors are different—Green instead of yellow for emitted light. Yet we normally are unaware of how objects change color in different conditions and unconsciously project whatever we know the color would be under uniform light without optical-processing artifacts, unless we consciously make the effort to consider environmental conditions. Additionally we don't actually see color at all if is dark, and instead slowly see monochromatic shadows with a secondary light-preceptor protein in the eye, commonly called visual purple; but we do not think the objects are different colors when it is night, even though that's what we actually see. Monet's Haystacks play with the changing of color's appearance at different times of day by emphasizing those tonal variations, engendering a dynamism to the paintings that might explain their meaningfulness to us. Moreover, the eye's edge-perception mechanism enhances nearby neighboring colors along their borders, but merges them depending on distance and lens focus in amazing ways that fauvists, pointillists, and other modern-art schools explore with rather more brute force than renaissance masters such as Michelangelo and Van Dyck.

Some, such as Randian objectivists, believe any argument on the nature of color should end there, unless it serves some material purpose, such as selling lipstick, to which the limited effectiveness of our visual range is only an irritation. Yet most complain not of the massive act of domination on our visual perception by our association with Regnum Plantae, instead considering the visual spectra only with pleasure, for of all the benefits that plants engender to animal life and human experience, color perception is one of particular delight. Such delight may or may not be a property of the object, depending on one's metaphysical view, so scientific explanation alone is not sufficient (for those who say delight is obviously not a property of the object, that's not what a buyer thinks at an art auction, so it's not so simple).

What can be expressed in a pure sign has far more potential than what can be expressed in words.

Art, is not just a sign, but meant to imply something, I.e. Of an artist.

Problem is we subliminally think art is like a word in a way, not like a sign.

It doesn't send a message, it's ineffable, but it definitely sends something; there is that which can be defined by it, but it's art factor is zero.

I was talking about the bird itself is using the wood, whose is the nest?

It's like - 'I am making a base' - the bird says.

You are conscious right now, yes? That - that - is consciousness. It's a state of you - and you're in it right now. And you knew you were conscious before reading Piaget, yes?

It's wrong too - consciousness is not a logical construct. That makes no sense at all.

@Bartricks

I had a narrow consciousness before reading Piaget, subsequently my consciousness broadened.
It took many years to fully digest. My instinct about this construct was strengthened by the double slit experiment, and further buoyed by recent developments in theoretical physics where they talk about consciousness creating matter.

try to substitute ' understanding of self and world that i live in ' for 'consciousness' in the definition of art.

Then it would become art is an expression of understanding of self and the world, and art work is information about understanding of self and the world, including subconscious elements


Art is an expression of human consciousness, and art work is information about the artists consciousness, and subconsciousness


See if that works for you?

See if that works for you?

No. First, why do you think you know more than me about this? Why do you assume that I'm the confused one, you the enlightened one?

The Piaget stuff is nonsense.

Consciousness is a state - a state of mind. That is, it is a state minds can be in. Just as 'solid' is a state water can be in, 'conscious' is a state minds can be in.

It's relevance to art, I take it, is that art is something that minds alone can produce. If we find that something that otherwise appeared to us to be a work of art was, in fact, the production of something entirely mindless, we would cease to consider it a work of art.

That doesn't give us a definition of art, it just puts a limit on what qualifies.

It's like - 'I am making a base' - the bird says.

Yes I think you're right, the construction isn't the nest, it is a kind of base, or pitch from where he operates. The females visit numerous bowers to inspect them and decide which matches her taste. This includes a dance by the male.

'conscious' is a state minds can be in.

I feel I should point out that you are not correct about consciousness, there are extensive discussions about what consciousness is in other parts of the forum and there are not many people who claim that consciousness is seated in the mind, except perhaps those who subscribe to idealism. Are you an idealist?

Consciousness is a state, or emergent property, of the body, the brain is involved in it, but the mind as a self consciousness is a construct overlaying, or superimposed on, the consciousness. This gives the person in combination with the consciousness of the body, the self of self conscious awareness which we experience as sentience, or being and our thinking mind is a part of this construct.

I would like to point out that you are wrong. There is no dispute that to be conscious is to be in a mental state of some kind. And a mental state, is, by definition, a state of mind.

What there is debate over is what kind of a thing a mind has to be in order to be able to be in that kind of a state.

And there are some who deny the actual existence of mental states - but they would eo ipso deny the existence of consciousness.

But congratulations on being so confidently confused.

So is a spider conscious? Or a Bower bird?

Well that's somewhat out of leftfield. If they have brains sufficiently similar to ours, then it would seem a reasonable inference to make, for our brains are clearly inhabited by minds and so it would be reasonable to infer that theirs are too.

Consciousness is a state created by beating heart and mind with universe.