Activity No. 4.1.

Name: Gwyneth Koleen Lopez Grade:____________________

Course: 2 DVM A Date: June 12 ,2021
Professor: Prof. John Lloyd Seniel

Instruction: Choose one or more of the following prompts. Try to write roughly
a page on each prompt you select. Write your answer on the space
provided.

Journal Prompt #1: Who Makes Art?

Answer the following questions and support your discussion with examples.
You may include images to help you in your explanation.
1. Who makes art?
2. Do you think artists have innate ability or acquired skill (or both)?
3. How do artist’s roles change with different cultural considerations?

Art for decades has been hard to directly understand and for most people, the
definition of a particular piece resonates differently depending on a lot of factors.
The fact that there are countless approaches of artistic interpretations and
analysis, one might see art similarly or as opposed to the artist. With this idea of
how diverse art is in mind, certain questions emerge in its area; questions like
“who makes art?”, “is art a talent or a skill?” and most especially, “does the artist’s
purpose change in reliance to their culture?”

The artist: personally, I am fond of the idea that making art makes you an artist,
nothing else. It is the artist who creates art. But this idea is much more complex
than that. For centuries, people have been asking what makes an artist, a true
artist? It is the creative impulse; if every day, one’s mind is running over the things
they are making, that’s artistry. Generally, each one of us can be an artist at some
point, we are all encouraged to express and put ourselves out there. Everyone
has an innate desire to create. Education systems and the society promotes
creativity because it helps in several aspects especially, our mental well-being.
So, it is easy to answer the question “who makes art?” with everyone can make
art because anyone can make art and be an artist once he or she pours himself
or herself into an artwork.

Talent or skill? To immediately answer, I believe it is both of our innate ability and
skills required in art. First, let us focus on art as a skill; the ability to draw, paint,
or render 3D images. These are skill sets, something artists worked towards
learning, it cannot be an immediate line of expertise as one comes out of the
womb. But to say that art is completely a learned skill set is too constricted and
unnecessary because not a lot of people are able to pick up a pencil and be good
at drawing or making a story. Not everyone can pick up a camera and just be
filled with ideas how to make someone look good in front of it. Artists are skilled
craftsmen, for every person we have a talent that was provided for a task but to
be an artist, it is the drive and desire to learn more, to express more and create
more. It requires the interest in doing it first and not everybody has that, or some
people have the interest in doing it but do not have the drive to push through the
discipline of getting better. To summarize, the creative mindset and natural
interest is an innate ability because artists take the extra step further, to push
their artworks a cut above, and that mindset is unteachable. This leads one to
start acquiring skill sets, to become professional artists for real world applications.
Art is not just one or the other, it is not talent alone or skill alone. The combination
of talent and skill is as important as finding the balance between both. It is not
about excluding one or the other it's about learning to see both of them and let
them work together.

Artists’ roles are of course strongly dependent with cultural considerations as can
be seen very clearly in varying artworks. For example, the Giotto crucifix and the
Minoan Snake Goddess. Western Art elevates the artist and his/her originality.
The work of art is given status in a museum, art gallery and material value are
placed on it meanwhile in non-Western cultures, art or other religious artefacts
such as Byzantine icons, certain rules are applied to the production of the
artefact. One can think of the way that art has developed over the centuries in
the west to see how it has changed as “civilization” changed and is still changing
and how art differs when embedded in different cultures; the many and varied
different approaches in indigenous art are good examples. In addition to the
cultural setting, art has been controlled by authorities in some cultures like in the
Soviet Union, officially approved art was required to follow the doctrine of socialist
realism. In China, dissident artist Ai Weiwei who was arrested because of his
works being investigative of corruption in their country. In some of these cultural
settings the artist had to adapt their art to the imposed cultural norms or face
expulsion, or worse.
Journal Prompt #2: Art21

View at least five short videos from ART21. You can search for artist’s names by
alphabet at the top middle of Art: 21’s homepage. Watch how they work and what
they say about their process. Then, place one artist in each of the following
categories:
1. Artist most concerned with the process of making the work.
2. Artist most concerned with creativity in the idea for their art or the work
itself.
3. Artist most concerned with materials
4. The artist who surprised you the most?
5. List the artists you viewed.

Link: https://art21.org/

Art21 is an interesting site that led me to discover different artists. I have seen a
video on Ellen Gallagher and it is remarkable how her art process works, she is
the artist most concerned with the procedure because she focuses on making air
bubbles from cuts on the paper. The process is important because she must
scrap away areas of her thickly painted canvases and inlaid black paper birds,
leaving their sharply cut edges distinctly visible which is very intricate and precise
work.

The artist most concerned with the idea on their artwork is Doreen Garner, her
art holds one of the heaviest concepts as she discusses the underlying racism in
the works of the modern father of gynecology, Dr. J. Marion Sims. She creates
visceral, life-like sculptures made of silicone, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and
glass beads, that acknowledge the brutality of Sims when he performed torturous
procedures on enslaved Black women without anesthesia or consent, for the
purposes of experimentation and research. Doreen Garner tries to induce trauma
to fight trauma for people not to overlook the ongoing abuse and stigma on black
women.

Kevin Beasley can be credited as the artist most concerned with his materials
because of his “material-oriented” practice. His works is set on juxtaposing
sound, silence, and sculpture to examine the legacy of cotton in the American
South. It is centered on the motor of a modern cotton gin. Kevin Beasley, being
the musician that he is, manipulates and enhances the motor’s tones through a
soundboard, each vibration embedded with a sonic history of the Southern soil.

Personally, artist Sarah Sze surprised me the most because of her power. Her
work is public and very challenging as she is able to design an immersive artwork
for the Second Avenue Subway in New York City. As a woman that empowers
me, her idea on putting how we move through everyday life on subways is truly
impressive. She embodied the opportunity to examine and amplify how we move
through space in her work because she wanted to highlight that it is this kind of
speed of movement, these transitions into different kinds of environments that we
take for granted and we do repetitively.

Art21 should be highlighted more, especially in different educational institutions.

If it were not for this subject, I would not have discovered this spectacular website
filled with artists overflowing of great, inspirational, and meaningful works. All in
all, the artists that I have viewed are, Ellen Gallagher, Jes Fan, Doreen Garner,
Theaster Gates, Song Dong & Yin Xiuzhen, Sarah Sze, Kevin Beasley, and
Shahzia Sikander.