Talk:Plastic arts

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 06:45, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Dance is "plastic art"?
It could be, if you consider the visual, plastic aspect of dance, sort of like moving sculpture. so that sort of puts it in two categories, a plastic art, and a performing art. Tom 00:32, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

The purist would argue that the word plastic means what is says and adjoined to arts means literally the application or use of plastic in creativity. In this sense dance does not sit comfortably as an art form under this expression. But, as modern language evolves, the idiomatic and colloquial become the order of the day that even lexiconists enshrine in their dictionaries. The history of dictionaries is the history of how language changes and how meaning is diffused across a wider expression. Who would have believed that art could mean what is conceived as well as what is produced. Mmm? MAG 091205

Dance is a plastic art? Huh. -- Fplay 05:37, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Please correct me if I am wrong, but dance is not really one of the Plastic Arts is it? Duncan Smith 11:42, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * See http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/Pin.html - I'm taking Dance out of plastic arts. (also rearranged this conversation to be chronological.) Clubmarx | Talk 20:08, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Merge this article into Visual Arts
I really think that Plastic Arts needs to be merged into Visual Art and then we should drop the word Plastic. I'm a professor of sculpture, I read journals of sculpture, talk to famous sculptors, and attend academic conferences and present papers on sculpture. No one in the field of sculpture refers to the plastic arts. We all call ourselves part of the visual arts. The phrase "plastic arts" largely fell out of common use in the mid-20th century. Just look at a few Google searches: Painting - 40 million hits; Sculpture - 15 million hits; but Visual Arts - 7 million; and Plastic Arts - 420,000. The conclusion is that, while sculpture is less referenced than painting, almost no one uses the phrase plastic arts. Why does no one use it? Because sculpture took on "non-plastic media" such as installation, performance, video projection etc in the 1960's and isn't only about clay, bronze, and statuary anymore. Grhabyt 14:52, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
 * This term seems to still be frequently used in some languages, for example Russian. If the term fell out of use in the mid-20th century in English, then this article should say so, and preferably explain why. The wrong thing to do would be to remove mention of it altogether. Esn (talk) 04:55, 25 August 2008 (UTC)


 * ...some years later... and finding myself going round and round in a circle of finding sources referring to each other, or just not referring to any source, or disappearing off-line on this term - one I've never encountered as a practising sculptor - I'm formally proposing it be precised, redirected, and slipped discretely into either the sculpture section of (or a new section of) Visual art as suggested above. Either that or if you have an attachment to it having a higher profile find some reliable attributions for the term - rather than "it is said" etc. The term also implies that stone or other materials that are carved are plastic, as opposed to soft (or softenable) ones which can be "modelled" or moulded. The "discuss" template points to here. I'm watching from  Trev M   ~   03:01, 20 March 2010 (UTC)


 * OK, time for the op. No comments or flags of any kind for this momentous occasion in the last 6 months. Essentially I'm going to robustly compress the page as it stands then slip it beneath the transcluded sculpture section, with a level 3 heading. This page will remain as the talk page for the redirect. Adding a note to this effect to Vis arts talk to this effect, as it's a more active page.  Trev M ~  19:27, 2 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Perhaps you should allow a little time to elapse with a note concerning this pending change on the Visual arts Talk page. That would give a larger audience notice of this and a short opportunity to speak up. Bus stop (talk) 20:07, 2 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Didn't see your comment, Bus stop, till I'd done it. But it feels OK and I may not have had the time and concentration these sort of ops take for a while yet. Anyone feels strongly enough to revert it all, I won't cry, as long as they really think it out and don't put the Merge banners back. Best,  Trev M ~  22:06, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I've been frustrated by the use of the word "plastic" in the art world. I think an article that addresses the issue is quite important. I agree that it's used in a different way today, but we do need to preserve an article that explains the meaning of terms like "plastic art", especially in the visual arts. Combining it into a "Visual Arts" article would only work if we had redirections for all the possible alternative uses of the world "plastic", as given by this article itself. Egrabczewski (talk) 11:09, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I also just added a clarification to the lede on Plastic arts, changing "plastic" as commonly understood to be a polymer, to "plastic" as any material that shows "plasticity", etc. Because I was focusing on the material aspect of the lede, but then realized that the whole article is all over the place regarding the definition of "plastic"   It is being used to describe: a material that has plasticity, plastic as a polymer,  anything that can be physically manipulated such as stone and metal, the sense of plastic as in meanings changing in the mind, etc. etc.Since all of these things, some contradictory, are being shoved under "Plastic arts", I would argue that almost anything could be described as a plastic art from one viewpoint or another.   So I think that this information should all be part of Visual arts (in general) or tease out discrete aspects of the terms "Plastic art" and have separate articles.   I am not knowledgeable enough to do this myself, but someone with an academic arts background could set up and consider the best way to handle this.   ~  • Bobsd •  (talk) 01:27, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Can we please continue this thread on Talk:Visual_arts now, if necessary, T, 22:30, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Removed section "artists working with plastic"
Seriously, did this contributor even *read* the article to understand what "plastic" means??? --tgeller (talk) 20:03, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

What on Earth is "arpapaiem"?
I think somebody just made this word up. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.54.100.35 (talk) 17:19, 1 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Agreed. No google results whatsoever.  • Bobsd •  (talk) 01:27, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion: You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 17:07, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Visual Gravity -2, 2017.jpg

Philosophy section is confusing to read
I find the Philosophy section in this article confusing to read, however I'm unsure how to edit it as I don't know where comments end and quotations begin. Hopefully someone will sort this out. Egrabczewski (talk) 11:05, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
 * My main thought is that the gallery is wierd & unhelpful. Johnbod (talk) 16:45, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree with both. The "Philosophy" goes off into a side alley without having said anything about the "main street". But that will take a lot of reading to work up into something worthwhile. Any volunteers?
 * The gallery has no sense of purpose, has not been curated in way. It seems to be just a subjective sampling of Commons. I can't think of any redeeming feature that would justify its retention. Delete? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 17:03, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Interlanguage links
I recommend unlinking this from the interlanguage links. "Artes plásticas" in Spanish refers to visual arts more broadly. Skimming several other languages seems to suggest the same. This article is more narrowly defining "plastic arts" as art in the medium of plastic. SilkPyjamas (talk) 17:07, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I rather doubt this. The Spanish article has 2 refs for the definition, the first of which (Merriam-Webster, in English) very dubiously gives a 2nd meaning of in effect all Visual art, but the 2nd, in Spanish, gives the same definition as here. I suspect the Spanish article should be rewritten. Johnbod (talk) 18:02, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
 * If you understand this article as defining plastic art as "art in the medium of plastic" (in the modern sense of hydrocarbon ploymers), we have failed. I will add a note about polymers but it is not easy because there are certainly modern artists who use polymers in their creations – most obviously artists who use acrylic paint. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 20:24, 7 June 2024 (UTC)