Art & Globalisation

June 2010
Table of content

Judging art 3

The context 3 Artwork 4 Artists 4 Observer 5

What is art ? 6

What are my standards (criteria) for deciding this is art? 7

What is beauty ? 8

What is the essence of art? 9

Sources 10

Judging art

I chose to do an analysis concerning ” un chien Andalou“. It is a sixteen-minute silent film produced in 1929 in France by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. Its title means "An Andalusian Dog" in English. It was the first film of both famous characters, and one of the best-know surrealist films of the avant-garde movement of 1920s (wikipedia - un chien andalou).

The context

This short movie took place in the surrealism context. Surrealism is a cultural movement during the 1920s. Born after the 1st worldwide war, this movement is characterized by the opposition to any social and moral convention. It is a revolutionary movement that privileges dream, instinct, desire and rebellion. This movement has affected literature, visual arts, film and music, as well as philosophy, social theory and political thought. It has come from Dadaism. Surrealistic work features the element of surprise and unexpected juxtaposition. (wikipédia – surrealism + Le surréalisme by Luc Vigier).

Visual art of surrealism has created insane illustrations, and has plunged the observer into strangeness and fantasy, for example « La tentation de Saint-Antoine » by Max Ernst, 1945 or « la main de Dali » by Dali.
Movies that implicate a lot of successive images can go deeper to madness and strangeness.
Following the surrealism, and thanks to the possibility of new technologies, cyber realism has allowed depicting dreamy illustrations by creating the impossible virtually.
We can take the example of Chayan Khoi’s artworks. He is a contemporary artist, which I like so much. He depicts unrealistic landscapes from real pictures he took all over the world. The atmospheres are magical and give up space to