Hello everyone! So i just wanted to share with you something that we are discussing in my painting class at school, the idea of Eurocentrism in art and how that affects the way we view art as "good" or "bad". Here is a response i wrote about this issue,
I think that the issue is that people place so much importance on defining art as good or bad . We tend to use european standards for what we consider to be good and placing works that don't fit into that category as bad, simply because it is something we are not used to seeing. I think that this has come about because in history Europe has held more power, and they tried to spread their world views and their artistic ideals to as many countries as possible, including North America. So people have grown accustomed to these rules and conventions of the great masters in European art history because thats what we have been taught is good art for so many years. This leads us to normally apply those ideals in our own art practices because its is something that we are familiar with so we consider it as "better” and when something puts those European ideals upside down and challenges the formal or technical aspects that we are accustom to, we can often dismiss it as being bad.
I also think that this is an excuse that no longer applies to us today, because in the past information about different cultures was not as readily available as it is now. Even though the European ideal of "good” art still happens today and is still taught in schools, we have the resources at our finger tips to find out more about the variety and diversity of different kinds of art that there is in the world, and it is up to us to know and explore this so that we can create work that is not culturally biased and so that we are not confined to the rules that we find in an european history text book.
And to be honest this was not something that i was really aware of before or simply didn't really care to think about, but since the discussion in class I've been thinking about why we have the ideals that we do and how this affects our practice, and how as artists this is a very important topic that a lot of us have chosen to ignore but needs to be challenged more and thought about more and even though we might not agree with the ideals of other cultures it is still in our best interest to be informed and have the knowledge to be able to form opinions and bring these opinions into our artistic practice... :)
Who made these painting "rules"
WHY should we conform to the ideals of old white men from thousands of years ago?
Art is ANYTHING you say it is !
"Mona Lisa" by Leonardo Davinci and Rashid Johnson "Message to our folks"
I realize that this a rather lengthy response but i do think this is an important issue and something worth thinking about !
