Do you need imagination to make art?
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Do you need imagination to make art?
It would seem one needs imagination to do art. Whether to paint/draw a picture or compose music or write a book e.g. Can anybody pick up a paintbrush and paint a picture right off the bat? Or would forethought and imagination be required, roadmap to know where you want to get to?
What say you to this?
PhilX
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
1. the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.
2. the action or process of forming such images or concepts.
3. the faculty of producing ideal creations consistent with reality, as in literature, as distinct from the power of creating illustrative or decorative imagery. Compare fancy (def 2).
4. the product of imagining; a conception or mental creation, often a baseless or fanciful one.
5. ability to face and resolve difficulties; resourcefulness: "a job that requires imagination."
6. Psychology. the power of reproducing images stored in the memory under the suggestion of associated images (reproductive imagination) or of recombining former experiences in the creation of new images directed at a specific goal or aiding in the solution of problems (creative imagination)
7. (in Kantian epistemology) synthesis of data from the sensory manifold into objects by means of the categories.
If we refer 'imagination' as in 3, creative imagination in 6 and 7, then one need imagination to create 'art,' especially fine arts (art comes in degree from basic to fine/sublime) and the creative products of geniuses.
What is significant here is the combining, synthesis, organizing, and creative, power inherent in the genius and artists that enable them to produce their aesthetical works. The big question is how can the ordinary person enable such productive (not reproductive) imaginative powers? Based on the current trend of the exponential expansion of knowledge in the relevant fields, I am optimistic, in the future, humanity will have the technology to facilitate the average person to increase and unleash their productive and creative imaginative powers.
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
1. The ability to draw upon the imagination and the images, sounds or words found from it, and express it into the material world in some tangible form.
but also
2. The mathematical and methodical practice of creating a structured plan to form it around. An example, to have a imaginative idea first, and then create a detailed, stepped plan from which you can practically and logically build the idea around. Like a skeleton, and once built you can start to apply the "flesh" on it section by section.
Another way to explain, is a controlled environment, in which you can allow moments of large spontaneity to burst within.
I believe imagination is very much needed to make sure your art is original, and not a copy of someone else's. Like to days major motion pictures are so redundant and similar, with no substance, that it shows they are only created to sell for money, not made to actually last and be remember through the ages with its message.
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
I would agree. This leaves the art work itself in need of a definition, or reconstrual. If it is just a matter of "belief" then what follows is that art is not about the object out there, but the disposition that observes it. we sit and look at clouds go by. At first they are clouds, then the interpretative or creative faculties kick in: It's a boat, a profile of Washington, etc. The clouds then become art works. driftwood is driftwood, but on my mantel it is art. What is out there is in play, not just artistically, but pragmatically. This book is now a door stop, now a weapon, all to fit the occasion. It fits into a comprehensive theory of meaning and aesthetics. Pragmatics.Theophane: A professional artist doesn't need imagination or even skill if he can make other people believe what he does is art.
-- Updated October 10th, 2014, 12:30 pm to add the following --
I would add that pragmatists don't hold this particular thesis, though they could. Dewey didn't.
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
The obverse side of that coin would be that it also calls into question those who would acknowledge the output of these quasi artists as art in the first place.Theophane wrote:A professional artist doesn't need imagination or even skill if he can make other people believe what he does is art.
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
"The Emperor Has No Clothes" is a trope that can manifest just about anywhere in our lives. Art, politics, literature, religion, etc.Jklint wrote:The obverse side of that coin would be that it also calls into question those who would acknowledge the output of these quasi artists as art in the first place.Theophane wrote:A professional artist doesn't need imagination or even skill if he can make other people believe what he does is art.
-- Updated October 11th, 2014, 8:21 pm to add the following --
Art would not exist in any form if it weren't for imagination, although that word has been stretched too far IMO.Logic_ill wrote:Maybe not all arts require imagination but it helps...
- Stephen C Pedersen
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Re: Do you need imagination to make art?
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