Art and Attribution: Who is an "Artist"? » Sociological Images - 0 views
-
NPR short on artist Liu Bolin. Bolin, we are told, “has a habit of painting himself” so as to disappear into his surroundings. The idea is to illustrate the way in which humans are increasingly “merged” with their environment.
-
So how does he do it? Well, it turns out that he doesn’t. Instead, “assistants” spend hours painting him. And someone else photographs him. He just stands there. Watch how the process is described in this one minute clip:
So what makes an artist?
-
One might argue that it was Bolin who had the idea to illustrate the contemporary human condition in this way. That the “art” in this work is really in his inspiration, while the “work” in this art is what is being done by the assistants. Yet clearly there is “art” in their work, too, given that they are to be credited for creating the eerie illusions with paint. Yet it is Bolin who is named as the artist; his assistants aren’t named at all. What is it about the art world — or our world more generally — that makes this asymmetrical attribution go unnoticed so much of the time?
- ...3 more annotations...
-
historically it probably goes back to the master/apprentice, atelier setup of the Renaissance era and earlier. And then with the cult of the “genius” that surrounds artists nowadays, it’s no wonder that assistants would be invisible.
-
In my art history classes about Renaissance and other classical painting, we talked about how often the “artist” would be the master painter, but had a lot of help from one or more assistants when executing the painting. Every now and then one of those assistants/apprentices would be considered good enough to go off and be recognized as an artist on his own, but in general, those guys were pretty nameless despite sometimes decades of service.
-
similar to the way that businesses and organizations have public faces – CEOs, etc. – and the efforts of everyone who works for them are often credited to the CEOs themselves, for better or for worse, whether they deserve the accolades or not. There’s some asymmetrical attribution for you!