Quote:
Originally Posted by Shostak
No, there isn’t, which is partly why so many art museums have decorative arts departments (ranging from chess sets to furniture), costume departments, what used to be considered ethnographic collections (which often contain religious or ceremonial objects), collections of arms and armor, film/movies, and now some art museums even collect video games.
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I'm not sure if it's a complete, absolute equivalence. For sure artists need to be paid and can sell their art (or a piece of it) multiple times, and we'll always need to find ways to fund academic study. But just because somebody is trying to profit on something doesn't make it a generic product to be sold, which is what I mean when comparing goods to art.
I have a hard time articulating the difference out loud because in my head, art is an abstract and intangible thing that's only partially expressed in the physical world. A song is sold to you on a disc or in a download, but you didn't buy the experience of that song being played at the high school dance and then at your wedding. The 'Fearless Girl' sculpture that was installed in New York to promote the State Street investment fund ended up being adopted more broadly as a symbol of protest and gender equality. Closer to home, Winchell Chung's iconic art that was commissioned for Ogre wasn't based on detailed measurements and specifications, but a vague sense of both wonder and terror the size and scope of a machine of war, and we might not have gotten that same result from a different artist.
I guess what I'm getting at is that goods are used, used up, and then discarded. But art persists and says new things to all the people who discover it, and its value isn't based on a tangible result. Art does something inside your head and in your heart to connect you to an impossibly large world and all the other people in it. When art hits, it does so at a unique moment in a way that can't be duplicated, imitated, or mechanized. I can't believe that what a machine can produce is at all equivalent, because that diminishes centuries of human expression and progress.
Whether those centuries have had any value at all up to this point is a different conversation though.