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1 response so far ↓
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Cheryl
// May 24, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Plato saw artists as imitators. He referred to imitators as magicians who only represent a subject through painting, poetry, or sculpture. Plato saw painters, specifically removed from truth because the work they create is a copy of a copy. Painters were taking an experience, an object, or a person and stopping time for a moment; creating an illusion of what the artist saw them as for that moment. Plato saw this as entertainment. He believed that rational people would view these works and not fooled by the image or imitation. Therefore, there was no use in having art in the first place. People would not be interested in viewing another man’s thoughts or interpretations of a moment unless they were true…and who characterized truth did not create art. Man would instead be interested in forming a legacy by creating an actual object rather an image of the object. Plato was critical of imitators because they were, in his view, entertainers. It was argued that if painters created an image of an actual object there were so many different ways to view that object just by standing in different locations, creating a different perspective, but it is still a view of a ‘truthful’ object. Plato however rejected this stating that it was an artist imitating a creation of another artist. The artist or craftsman who actually made the object was following a guise of truth, however the artist who chose to re-create it in a representational form was revealing an essence of the object. This ideal Plato strongly rejected. He did not find relevance in ideas of expression, communication of form, eliciting a response from the viewer, nor presenting a truthful object in an inspirational manner. These ideas were dangerous because they allowed people to think in terms other than a logical, rational, mathematical formula that Plato preached. In addition to that, Plato did not understand why anyone would choose to succumb to a life of imitating others and or creating moments and appearances of reality. The only way to do this, Plato believed, was to be the theme or the image itself by creating a truth. Fortunately for those of us who are painters, expressionism, the understanding of pure form and art for arts’ sake giving the artist an ability to elicit a reaction from the viewer from the representation they choose to portray replaced these theories. To the modern society, this can be as much of a legacy as those who create the physical objects we paint or even those we use to paint.
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