Is the Decorative Art Ending?
When human being started for the first time to build what he needed to live, nobody knew that this was the first step in the development of a kind of art which accompanies people in production for years. And now it has become important to be known as an independent art (not considering the number of its opponents and advocates) and in this way, the decorative arts were created. An art which joined human life and you could it in the nearest space with people’s life, in order to associate with it and experience a hollow and prosaic life without it. The ornament was the first step to attain decorative arts (artwork intended for ornamental purposes. Differing from fine art, decorative art is intended to have a purpose as interior decoration. Some examples of decorative arts include furniture, ceramics, glass and jewelry.) which not only did not separate itself from the people but opened its way to the houses of worship and holy places, in the way that ornament became an inspirited part of production in human’s life. As evidence you can find museums full of objects defined as decorative artworks today, the oldness of these ornamental objects can be traced back to the early days of life on earth, from the far west to far east and have a part in these treasures, from Maya to Celt and Persian, Indian, Chinese and Japanese art, as you can find it in the explanations. There is direct relation between ornament and decorative art, in other words ornament is the source, mother and generator of decorative arts, which was interesting for people from the very beginning. We can name the ornament, which were used in glasses, potteries and even hunting bows and bayonets as examples. Some people believe that decorative arts belonged to the women and they decorated objects while making them but human has always drawn his favorite drawings on things for the sake of their beauty; this procedure has continued and has received some changes in each period, in this way we can separate different generations and guess the age of traditional works and buried treasures with little error (in the 19th century many opponents called ornamental applied artworks decorative artworks to ridicule them. In a way, they believed that decorating objects is a useless work and so there was no point in doing so; as a result they fought with it. On other hand, the advocates criticized the industrialization due to decorative art. In this disturbance, decorative art rose with determined explanations and made an identity for itself. The point I will proceed to discuss regarding this subject is concerned with the existence and survival of this constant art, which exists in other shapes today and has enlarged in a searching and active form, and show off in our surrounding world.
In the beginning of the 20th century, with the powerful presence of the modernists in the field of art and architecture, decorative art was strongly rushed and went to the sill of decline and annihilation. In a very strong manner, modernists proceeded in this matter in opposition and denied any ornamentation strongly and with cruelty. Gothic, Baroque and Rococo styles have left peerless and undeniable works behind them but in this period everyone looked at them with ridicule. The modernists abandoned any kind of ornament very quickly, and began to build dings and metal constructions without hiding the connections, they just considered the usage of the products and works and moved toward to the simply sizing; this carelessness comes to the point when Adolf Loos compares and equates ornamentation with crime, and believes that: “ornament means wasted labor and therefore wasted health.”
Magnificent, dignified, disgusting and ridiculous were the titles given to sumptuous architecture of the old centuries. This procedure continues but parallel to it, we absorb a movement in Europe and America known as Arts and Crafts Movement (A British and American aesthetic movement occurring in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. Inspired by the writings of John Ruskin and a romantic idealization of the craftsman taking pride in his personal handiwork, it was at its height between approximately 1880 and 1910. It was a reformist movement that influenced British and American architecture, decorative arts, cabinet making, crafts and even garden design). The Arts and Crafts Movement began primarily as a search for authentic and meaningful styles for the 19th century and as a reaction to the eclectic revival of historic style of the Victorian era and to "soulless" machine-made production aided by the Industrial Revolution. Considering the machine to be the root cause of all repetitive and mundane evils, some of the protagonists of this movement turned entirely away from the use of machines and towards handcraft, which tended to concentrate their productions in the hands of sensitive but well-heeled patrons. And we absorb Pattern and Decoration movement too. (The Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement began in the 1970’s and Alan Shields and Miriam Schapiro were important innovators. The museum recently acquired significant examples by both starting an initiative to collect in this area. Two other key P&D works of art from the 1970s were donated to the museum in 2002: a shaped painting by Cynthia Carlson and a flocking-covered fan sculpture by Barbara Zucker. John Scott's highly decorative sculpture, Doorway for the Blues, is an example of kinetic African American P&D. This is an area ripe for reexamination and collecting, which will only be feasible in the new space), both of them influence the survival of the decorative arts and ornaments.
Decorative arts will not disappear.
Many years has past from this conflict and as expected, all of these tacts have became quiet in the cuddle of this kind mother, the magnificence of Notre-dame in the shadow of metal phantom of Paris (Eiffel ) will never be hided. You can see lots of these peaceful coexistences in Europe, which is the mother of decorative arts, the modern phantoms are the sumptuous, magnificence and dignity contracts of decorative arts. In the contemporary age we see the existence of young and new arts such as graphic design, but we can see the effect of ornamentation in it as well. In other words, if ornament was buried in the depths of narrow and dark vestibules of history and now name remind from it decorative arts never lasted, as the human is restless and unstable for ornament, and this thirst for ornamentation is somehow his heritage of cave-dweller ancestors.
Ornament will not end.
Even a new fangled art such as graphic design is not inseparable from this eternal magic of history never coming to an end. It traverses the complicated way of history like a magic bid. Art is flowing in our existence from moral beauty to external beauty; ornament will not end; it just changes from one shape to another. We can even see that in contemporary modern arts and architecture, they achieve beautiful and shapely combinations by playing with the simple forms and the mere simplicity is not rolling but this is the ornament which has changed the shape according to the soul of the work.
Ornament is staying.
Whenever we enter a museum we cannot hide our amazement and consternation arising from the accuracy and elegance of the work times, morality is staining and is as eternal as history and will exists as long as it exists. There is no doubt that our children will surely find a way to decorate their works, on to doubt this is that magic ornament.