jtilley wrote:

I worked as a museum curator for three years, and have been teaching museum studies on the college level for twenty-five.  I (along with most others in the museum field) figured out a long time ago that attempting a definition of "art" is a waste of time.  Even if two people could agree on such a thing, they wouldn't have accomplished anything useful by doing so. It's particularly pointless to attempt such a definition on a categorical basis - i.e., to assert that one form of activity constitutes "art" and another "craft."  Most of us, I suspect, would agree that Van Gogh's oil paintings are "art" and an unpainted plastic kit slapped together out of the box isn't.  But there is simply no reasonable logic by which the ship portraits (oil paintings on canvas - sometimes churned out at a rate of one every two days) by James Bard and Antonio Jacobsen can be considered "works of art" and the models of people like Harold Hahn and Donald McNarry can't.  Where does the line lie?  I don't know - and I see no point whatever in arguing about it. The implication that scale models categorically cannot be considered "art," because every modeler working on the same subject will produce an identical result, is nonsense.  No two competent scale modelers will produce identical replicas of the same subject - just as no two competent photographers will shoot identical pictures of the same subject.  And surely no sensible person questions whether photography is an "art form." Beyond that, I don't think Lingcod9's comments warrant the dignity of a response - and I hope this thread will get back onto its original topic.

---

ERIC VON

Thanks, fellas, for getting back to the point – admiring a really nice model.

If the discussion again devolves into an agrument about the definition of "art," we'll have to lock it.

Thanks.

Kelly, FSM