Big ideas and Art making

I agree when the author says that big ideas can expand our art making concerns beyond technical skills, formal choices and media manipulation to human issues and conceptual concern. Big ideas can engage us in deeper level of thinking. Becoming personally connected to a big idea is highly important for art making. Big ideas represent the artist’s overall purpose for art making, and they tell in broad conceptual terms what the artist is about.

Examples of big ideas,

<!    ·Power

<!    ·Life and death

        ·Individual identity

<      ·Community

<!     ·Emotional life

<!     ·Family

<!     ·Idealism

<!     ·Social norms

<!     ·Materialism

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 Themes become a big idea when it persists throughout an artist’s body of work. Subject matter is the artist topic, whereas big ideas are the artist concept that is what creates the main body of art making for example, for Jennifer Bartlett’s, gardens are the subject matter but her big ideas are houses,boats,oceans and landscapes. Big ideas are rules and systems represented by human attempts to impose order and meaning. Artist frequently transfer big ideas from one subject to another.