Monday, December 1, 2008

Mother of all Arts

With this blog I hope to initiate some discussion comments and show you some of my projects.

Architecture has been called the "mother of all arts" and that could present a good discussion topic for starters. I first heard that phrase twenty years ago when I was in architectural history classes at the University of Houston. I really did not think too much about it until I became more involved with fine art again over the last few years.  I want to give that thought a bit more research. What do you think? Do you agree? or disagree? Why?

Click on post title to leave a comment.

7 comments:

  1. To me the mother of all arts would be cave paintings, not architecture. The caves were already there and man used them as his shelter. He did not build shelters till later on.

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  2. I found another site wherein the author believes that philosophy is the mother of all arts. This is quite interesting really. Here is the url:
    http://www.wburg.com/0302/articles/editor.html

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  3. The author Kirsten Hively writes:

    "It has been said that architecture is the "mother of all arts," but I think it's just one of the children. The real mother, in my mind, is philosophy. Philosophy — the pursuit of wisdom — is the homeland of art. Outside are crafts, illustration, most popular culture. And while there are some who straddle the border, it's philosophy, the nurturing of ideas, the deep think that makes art, well, art...."

    http://www.wburg.com/0302/articles/editor.html

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  4. Lori, I wouild have to agree with you that art came first before architecture. I believe it was FLW who made the statement about architecture being the mother art, although I don't know if he was the first. Frank Lloyd Wright was a character, and perhaps his original statement has been twisted in meaning from its original intent. The quote below could be analyzed even more. What exactly did Wright mean when he referred to the "soul of our own civilization." Certainly, when an architect designs, (s)he gets into the same zone an artist does when painting. There is soul in both art and architecture.

    "The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization."
    --Frank Lloyd Wright

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  5. Hmm, I think the cavemen may have been painting before people began philosophizing. I'll go check that link and see if I change my mind.

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  6. Were the cave dwellers actually creating art for art's sake, or were they communicating a story before having a real verbal language? How can it ever be determined if cave drawings were art, graffiti, or documentation of a day in the life. And if they were one and not the other, does that make them any less art?

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  7. No doubt about it, they are art. Beautiful, stylized paintings. It doesn't matter to me why I paint or someone else does, its still art. I am sure the artist enjoyed the process of painting those animals once he or she got going at it for whatever reason they had to start with. Now I got to go look again and see if I think more than one person there did the paintings.

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