Introduction
This book is an attempt of answering the following questions: What is at stake in a work of visual art? What is visual art for? Why are some works of art more valuable and interesting than others?
These issues are normally treated by philosophers and art historians. They intend to encompass the ”essence of art”, that is, the idea of art as such or those properties common of all works of art.
However, metaphysical theories about visual art are useless to anyone who wants to become a practitioner of art. They are hardly informative to the general audience. Even worse, the evolution of contemporary art has made such theories obsolete. The works of the artists are always ahead of the aesthetic theories and they invariably confuse the theorists.
In short, I share the opinion expressed by the psychologist Rudolph Arnheim in his 1971 book Art and Visual Perception:
I believe many people to be tired of the dazzling obscurity of arty talk, the juggling with catchwords and dehydrated aesthetic concepts, the peudo-scientific windowdressing… Art is the most concrete thing in the world, and there is no justification for confusing the minds of people who want to know more about it.
My approach to visual art is pragmatic. I intend to show what contemporary artists actually do when they produce works of art. What can be learned from studying their works? What can be learned from their written statements?
On the basis of this kind of investigation, I intend to suggest a definition of visual art based on a special way of dealing with concepts. I claim that this method can be deduced from classical and contemporary works of visual art, includings the most recent works of art. I call this method the Game of Visual Art.
It is productive to consider works of visual art as conceptual games, kindred to word-games, jokes and puns, all of which are creative playing with concepts.
Conceptual playing has been of vital importance in the history of mankind. As stated by George Lakoff, profesor of cognitive science at the University of California-Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, the artistic mind is the power behind most of our thinking and acting.
Games of art offer nothing more than a framework to be filled by the player. Part of the work is the framework, that is, pieces and rules. The work of visual art comes into existence when the game is played by the spectator. It is an open system that can be played in many ways. The Italian author and philosopher Umberto Eco has made an elaborated statement of this fact.
The first part of this book elucidates certain basic principles characteristic of the tradition of visual art, and conceptualized as game systems. I focus upon the goals which artists try to realise when they are working on their projects.
The second part of this book is a collection of examples where more theoretical points of view from the first part of the book are illustrated through analyses of different modern works of art, from Éduard Manet to Réné Magritte.
You may consider this book as a small work of art constructed as a game based on the metaphor: Art Is A Game.
Leif G. Larsen