For millennia humanity has been creating an inexhaustible
number and varieties of things that have been referred to as art. A few pieces
of art have remained as treasures while most are quickly discarded, destroyed,
lost, or tacitly fade into the memory of the ethereal cosmic abyss through the
pathos of neglect. Throughout chronicles of human narrative, historians,
critics, and practitioners of the arts in every culture have tried to explain
various phenomenon of the arts. Each generation adds to this body of knowledge
and has the opportunity to increase understanding of the arts with new patois.
That is the purpose of this dialogue. Every spectrum of study has a vernacular
idiosyncratic to its domain, some with various dialects familiar only to its
practitioners and critics. The arts are no different. Presently, as a
professional art educator I'd like to bequest three terms for use in the
lexicon of the arts world to be utilized by artists, educators, museum staff,
connoisseurs, patrons, critics, and historians that can be applied to further
explain and understand the universe of the arts. These are artra, trans looping
aesthetics, and pseudo-art. In earlier writing I've provided a fresh,
comprehensive definition of art that transcends mediums, or venues for artistic
production and performance. This designation also encompasses all historical
"isms".SugarGig As you may recall, this introduced
art as an acronym for itself: Aesthetic Rendering of Thought. In order for Art
to exist, the following three (3) criteria must be met. There must be some
sensory manifestation (Rendering), fugitive or permanent, that is based upon a
creative, intellectual process (Thought) with the intention of a beautiful or
pleasurable (Aesthetic or Anti-aesthetic) action, or reaction, in one or more
of the senses and/or psyche.An art work is the product of the creator's
directed efforts, duh; however, some is never intended for public experience.
In this condition and familiarity it is only A.R.T. SugarGig (an aesthetic
rendering of thought). However, when the art object or performance is
encountered by an audience other than its originator and the rendering elicits
an aesthetic experience, then we have artra. Artists can possess ambient aesthetics,
or euphoria, in creative processes involving conceptualization, fabrication
efforts, and in evaluation through the various stages of production or
performance to the art's completion. It's part of their half of artra. The
viewer's aesthetic participation is in the "looking glass"
section.Artra is a palindrome of the total encounter of art; it is the journey
of going "through the looking glass". The art audience perceives
through one or more of their physical senses a corporeal existence of an art
object. Next, one has a metaphysical aesthetic incident and mental evaluation
and then returns to the art object or performance. This psychic traveling
"through the looking glass" and returning I refer to as
"translooping aesthetic". Artra is the collective aesthetic and
corporeal acknowledgment and interaction with a work of art by both the artist
and the audience. One must note that both the artist and the audience will not
be subjected to the same aesthetic familiarity or artra involvement, nor to the
same degrees, due to the frame of reference for each party.The realm of art
history, theory and criticism, or collectively known as artology, engages many
conjectures and evaluations. To this arena we can add pseudo-art. Psuedo-art is an item that some people have perceived as an art
object or performance, but was not created by a living entity with the intent
of an aesthetic condition. Consequently, it is not true art. For instance, one
could be pleased and enthralled by the lighting, undulating textures, and
colors of the bark of a beech tree, it's beautiful. Certainly the beech is a
created object, but, trees are not generated by earthbound sentient beings for
the purpose of communication toward an aesthetic purpose. A tree, however, can
be manipulated to be an art object. Such is the case with the art of
Bonsai. Psuedo-art is the matter of concern that presents an aesthetic
after taste. Artists are often inspired by pseudo-art.As you become more
familiar with Artology as a sojourner in the corridors of the world's arts
history, feel free to adjoin discourse in rumination, affirmation, or as
disagreement to these ideas.