In the article ar is decribed as, "that human activity that can confound the basic sense we make of things so that we see things in a manner we might otherwise never have considered." While this can apply to some art it isn't the definition of art. All the post-modern and experimental art seems to try to subvert our assumptions of what art is or our beliefs, but I think a well made pot or painting of some fruit also count as art.
I was fairly confused throughout the reading as to the implications of what was said. The definitions of what was being done never seemed to be definite. The first sentence,"Novelty is intrinsic to semiosis, the complex processes by which meaning is differentiated in signification.", broke down to "Producing meaning involves importance and new-ness", in my mind. Art is described to show the viewer a representation of something and through that, the new ways in which that thing are related to the viewer.
Concerning how novelty and semiosis and creativity tie in to identity, I don't think this is an easy question to answer. I guess that identity can be how one sees themselves in relation to other things; be they religions, social groups, other indivduals, and by making art that reinvents how you see things it changes how you see yourself?
Perhaps there are differing degrees of "seeing things in a manner we might otherwise never have considered"?
ReplyDeleteWhen I see a lovely still life of fruit (to take a prosaic example, the kind you think gets left out of Biggs), I might breathe a little easier and then look more closely at apples in general. I will be seeing apples differently. And, certainly, such paintings have been used over time to encourage viewers to consider anew how time passes all too quickly or how death will come to us all, because all fruit eventually and too soon decays (or is consumed in other ways!).
Biggs is working off that realization, I think, though, to push at something (he thinks) is larger or more important. I think he is encouraging us to see how all meaning making involves, fundamentally, making distinctions between what something is and what something is not. When art then succeeds at helping us see something new, it is because it has created a new distinction.
Given all that, and if identity formation is a process of identifying for one's self what one is and what one is not, then art can be aimed at helping us see anew something outside of us but also something about ourselves.
I am pretty much just repeating here what you have already written, working it out for myself. But that is another way of saying that I don't think you are confused at all; I think you are trying to make something abstract more concrete.
To understand all this further, we would need to start talking about specific examples of art and identity formation, perhaps?