These authors say there is humour to be found in Egyptian tomb paintings http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/196803/humor.from.the.tombs.htm and http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/humor.htm
Ah, and here is an article on The First Joke: Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Humor – which posits that the oldest known joke was made in Australia, sadly without a suggestion as to what it was!

Gosh Tom. I had to read the text again to pick up that there was a considerable amount of ‘ethnic’ joking (rather than purely positing a humourous scenario). See Ted Cohen’s ‘Jokes: Philosophical thoughts on joking matters’.

True – jokes of this type are another form of portrait painting via word pictures. The English, Australians and Dutch were having their less than flattering portraits painted.

I wonder when the first jokes about paintings were made – presumably after secular themes took the place of religious themes. My uninformed guess would be that it was when portrait painting became a popular genre.

So I agree artist judgment will trump artistic skill. Andy Goldsmith is a real artist, whether or not he is presently regarded as one. This is just a matter of his work being accepted within the established canon.

Not sure who proffered the insult classifying dance and drama as minor arts. It would be interesting to see their explanation.

Tom when are you going to hold your exhibition of photographs from the edge?

The last point has often struck me, particularly in amateur art shows, and I see it as the contrast between ‘artistic skill’ and ‘artistic judgement’. It’s good to have both (!) but for the classification of what counts as ‘art’, I think artistic judgement is more important than technical skill. Here is an example. I do not know what ‘inspired’ me but in the early ’70s I had the idea, as a temporary installation, of fixing a hoopback chair I had beachcombed to a perilous point on a sea cliff. Getting it in exactly the right place would have required skill in (1) climbing a steep, wet, muddy cliff (2) fixing the chair in position (3) choosing EXACTLY the right point (4) then, I assume, I would have wanted a photograph – and this would have required luck, skill and the right equipment. I might have got everything right, with a lowering sky and seal-coloured waves crashing into foam on a rocky shore, but, except for the photography, I would have seen the ‘artwork’ as more of an exercise in artistic judgement than in the skills artists are expected to have. In amateur art shows I am usually struck by the surprisingly high level of traditional ‘artist’s skills’ and the unbelievably low level of artistic judgement. And if Andy Goldsmith is not regarded as a real artist, would my photograph have been fine art, or stupidity? I know what my Granny, who could do good watercolours, would have thought!
PS I don’t think much about dismissing dance and drama as ‘minor arts’ – it seems a gratuitous insult.

The wiki entry for fine art is interesting too:

1) It historically distinguishes between 2 (painting) and 3 dimensional (sculpture and architecture) visual arts and the auditory arts of music and poetry. [I am assuming poetry predates writing as music predates notation.]

2) The performing arts of dance and drama are considered minor arts. Perhaps because they rely on a mixing of the visual and auditory arts?

Modern concepts of the fine arts are also much more hybridised…

Magdalena is an interesting artist. It seems she is communicating from a very unique and yes dark world view, but perhaps like the philosopher Sartre, a worldview not without its sense of the heroic and poignant. It seems a very human and fine grained perspective.

Yes, I am not sure what the thresholds of technical innovation might need to be in order to be considered sufficient for the purposes of art. Perhaps the idea of a virtuouso performance is an appropriate metaphor? [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuoso ]

Technique and expression are often considered separately as areas within which practitioners might excel within the fine arts.

Although I doubt whether it would be possible to either:

1) have bad technique and good expression and still be considered to excel or 2) Have good technique and no expressive qualities and still be considered to excel.

This raises the difficult question of ‘What is art?’ My answer is that ‘fine art’ involves creating an image which relates to an idea/sentiment/feeling/theory about the the universe/world/life/locality etc. The idea can be old, with a new image; the idea can be new, with a modified image. Or both. Magdalena Abakanowicz has new-old images and, so far as I can tell, a rather gloomy world-view. The wiki entry captures this Russo-Polish gloom with the word ‘Humanoid’.
I am doubtful about technical innovation being sufficient to distinguish a work as ‘art’.