Culture is all-encompassing and stretches into many fields including art. Although art can be viewed as a vehicle for individual expression, all individuals who had ever created art have been influenced by their unique cultural context. For that reason traditional Navajo rug (pictured) will obviously look different from a Medieval Italian tapestry or Rembrandt's painting of a voluptuous nude woman. Yet through the use of symbolism, various colours, patterns or other specific imagery all three serve an important purpose of giving the viewer a glimpse into the culture and essentially worldview of the artisan/artist that created them. This raises the point of art's unique perspective. Where to somebody raised in Western Europe a rug in the picture might represent a simple yet aestetically pleasing pattern of geometric lines, a Navajo Indian would see a symbolic representation of a popular story or important religious belief. Sadly our eye for what is art is still coloured by ethnocentrism, maintaining popular value judgments that a picture painted on a fabric with oils by a dead Dutchman somehow has more artistic/cultural value than a Navajo artist's "weaved" picture. So perhaps art shouldn't be categorized into "fine", "naive" or "folk" art as much as it should be viewed as diverging expressions of culturally-relevant symbols.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
What culture means to me
Culture is all-encompassing and stretches into many fields including art. Although art can be viewed as a vehicle for individual expression, all individuals who had ever created art have been influenced by their unique cultural context. For that reason traditional Navajo rug (pictured) will obviously look different from a Medieval Italian tapestry or Rembrandt's painting of a voluptuous nude woman. Yet through the use of symbolism, various colours, patterns or other specific imagery all three serve an important purpose of giving the viewer a glimpse into the culture and essentially worldview of the artisan/artist that created them. This raises the point of art's unique perspective. Where to somebody raised in Western Europe a rug in the picture might represent a simple yet aestetically pleasing pattern of geometric lines, a Navajo Indian would see a symbolic representation of a popular story or important religious belief. Sadly our eye for what is art is still coloured by ethnocentrism, maintaining popular value judgments that a picture painted on a fabric with oils by a dead Dutchman somehow has more artistic/cultural value than a Navajo artist's "weaved" picture. So perhaps art shouldn't be categorized into "fine", "naive" or "folk" art as much as it should be viewed as diverging expressions of culturally-relevant symbols.
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I agree with your definition of culture through art. It brings those who read this entry some insight in how cultural art means to us or those of western culture and other cultures. As you mentioned to us a rug might just be a rug but to someone else it has more intrinsic value and meaning.
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