Duplicate this page before you start, and write your answers in your own copy.

🎞️ 1. Starting point

Last lesson you watched Finding Vivian Maier and thought about four questions. One of them was whether her photographs are art. Today we push on that question and ask what it is that makes anything art.

Are Vivian Maier's photographs art?
Why do different people in the documentary see Vivian and her work so differently?
What does the documentary suggest makes a great photograph?
Is it right that we are seeing Vivian Maier's photographs?

✍️ Write here: are Vivian Maier's photographs art? Why, or why not?

🖼️ 2. Is this art?

We will look at a sequence of images together. For each one, the question is the same: Is this art? Why, or why not?

As we go, you will build a list of the reasons you give. By the end of the lesson that list will be messy, full of contradictions, and probably unsatisfying. That is the point.

Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (c.1503–1519)

[Source]

Oil on poplar panel, housed in the Louvre. Probably a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant. It is the most famous painting in the world, though not universally considered the most technically accomplished. Its fame surged after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and recovered two years later. Before the theft, it was one significant painting among many.

Is this art because Leonardo made it, or would it be art if your neighbour painted it?

Is this art?

Why, or why not?

Damien Hirst, Void (2000)

[Source]

A wall-mounted cabinet containing thousands of individually crafted pills, each one hand-painted to resemble real medication but made of plaster and resin. Part of Hirst's wider body of work exploring faith, mortality and our trust in pharmaceuticals. Hirst did not make the pills himself; they were produced by his studio assistants under his direction.

Hirst did not make these pills himself. Is arrangement by a named artist enough?

Is this art?

Why, or why not?