A Farewell to Art
Aug. 5th, 2013 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueObviously (or maybe not obviously, because probably not a lot of people have followed my career all that closely and it involves some pretty obscure work when I get highbrow), a recurring preoccupation of my artwork is the question of what art is and isn't. Not polemically, or with a particular agenda that seeks to prove "this and not this." I would say my thesis is roughly that there is art and not art, and there are gradations in between, and although they can't be precisely quantified, that doesn't mean there is no difference.
Oddly enough, this is kind of a radical view (although not among people with a critical theory background). A combination of pomo and populism took tenacious hold of the mainstream, so that the average person on the street - including the average working artist - tends at the moment to say, if asked, that everything is art, as proven by Duchamp and Warhol (who were each saying more complicated things and disagreed with each other, but the average person on the street has not made a deep study of Duchamp or Warhol).
There is an obvious appeal to believing that everything is art, partly because if you say that everything is art, you say that nothing should be censored, and you say that every form of expression (including accidental expression) is valuable (because the average person would also say that art is "good," which is not something I would say is necessarily true), which means your every expression is valuable. It fits nicely with "all is love" or "god is everywhere," and it's pleasantly egalitarian. It is also a viewpoint that has been welcomed and promoted by capitalists*, because it's good business; you don't have to pay people as much if they are getting to do art (all that intangible goodness), and you can ask that people pay more for an object that has artistic value beyond itself, which is great if you want to sell more toothbrushes or save on labor costs when making artisan sandwiches.
However, I don't find the view that everything is art persuasive, because at that point we might as well say there is no such thing as art - and yet there clearly is art, and we clearly are comfortable making distinctions about it, such that we have art museums and art films and art history. You can show me your family photo album and trust that I'm not going to spend an hour trying to figure out why you've juxtaposed this photo with this photo and what it says about mother-son relationships that you've underexposed the houseplant. (You can't actually trust this, because as an artist I may decide on the spur of the moment to make your family album art by recontexualizing it, but you see my point. And I may only be pretending to recontextualize it as art as an act of entertainment or satire. Or, realistically, to annoy you.)
Along these lines, a group that has stood up for the "no this is not art" camp is comedians. Most (although not all) comedians have resisted the artist label, seeing it as a sneaky way to devalue entertainers and entertainment and force it into a more "serious" narrative. A fair number of comic book artists and filmmakers have similarly pushed for a right to not make art, but rather to artistically make something which does not have the goal of being art. There are people in architecture and in product design on both sides of the argument.
Drawing on some explorations by LeShan and Margenau (not artists or art critics, but a psychologist of human development and a physicist/philosopher), my feeling about art is "I know it when I see it." Which is not a good definition where laws are concerned (look where it got pornography), so I don't make laws about it. However, it is mistake to think that because I can't define it precisely that it doesn't exist. For instance, you and I may disagree about when day becomes night (when the sun sets? when it's a certain amount dark? after dinner? 8pm?), but it would be a mistake to surmise that night doesn't exist. In fact, we have a clear idea of what night is. Many of our concepts have this kind of fuzziness at the edges - childhood, for instance, or pain.
Quite often I am more concerned with entertainment or direct communication than creating some kind of liminal space that frees and challenges the recipient through a playful yet holy transport. Other times, I am definitely making art, and to be honest one of the ways I can tell something is art is that it is a bit embarrassing, but this is also a way I can tell something is bad, so I can't say that embarrassment is a good litmus test for art.
I think a good deal of training is helpful, and also confronting the question over and over.
However, I am thinking today that I may be done with the word art, not because I don't think it exists, but because I am tired of it not communicating. There is no substitute word, but at the moment when someone says art they might as well say dadadadada. It is not exactly "um," but it's not "art" either, because it is said without a definition. I similarly abandoned "nature" and "natural" some time back, and more recently "sexy," when I noticed that people would attach "sexy" to anything they wanted me to like, regardless of whether it had anything to do with sex or arousal of me or anyone else. It has probably been ten years since I ascribed meaning to the word "healthy," which is presently applied to a range of products and behaviors, but not to people. None of us are well, as it turns out. Ever. Despite everything we do being healthy - so healthy we should indulge and not feel guilty, which we do because we ourselves are not healthy.
For the moment, you are free to assume at all times that I am behaving in a way that is sexy, healthy, and natural, and that this is art.
Don't we all feel wonderfully affirmed.
* Remember, I am an economist and don't use "capitalist" as an epithet; I use it to describe people who own capital, such as businesses.
Oddly enough, this is kind of a radical view (although not among people with a critical theory background). A combination of pomo and populism took tenacious hold of the mainstream, so that the average person on the street - including the average working artist - tends at the moment to say, if asked, that everything is art, as proven by Duchamp and Warhol (who were each saying more complicated things and disagreed with each other, but the average person on the street has not made a deep study of Duchamp or Warhol).
There is an obvious appeal to believing that everything is art, partly because if you say that everything is art, you say that nothing should be censored, and you say that every form of expression (including accidental expression) is valuable (because the average person would also say that art is "good," which is not something I would say is necessarily true), which means your every expression is valuable. It fits nicely with "all is love" or "god is everywhere," and it's pleasantly egalitarian. It is also a viewpoint that has been welcomed and promoted by capitalists*, because it's good business; you don't have to pay people as much if they are getting to do art (all that intangible goodness), and you can ask that people pay more for an object that has artistic value beyond itself, which is great if you want to sell more toothbrushes or save on labor costs when making artisan sandwiches.
However, I don't find the view that everything is art persuasive, because at that point we might as well say there is no such thing as art - and yet there clearly is art, and we clearly are comfortable making distinctions about it, such that we have art museums and art films and art history. You can show me your family photo album and trust that I'm not going to spend an hour trying to figure out why you've juxtaposed this photo with this photo and what it says about mother-son relationships that you've underexposed the houseplant. (You can't actually trust this, because as an artist I may decide on the spur of the moment to make your family album art by recontexualizing it, but you see my point. And I may only be pretending to recontextualize it as art as an act of entertainment or satire. Or, realistically, to annoy you.)
Along these lines, a group that has stood up for the "no this is not art" camp is comedians. Most (although not all) comedians have resisted the artist label, seeing it as a sneaky way to devalue entertainers and entertainment and force it into a more "serious" narrative. A fair number of comic book artists and filmmakers have similarly pushed for a right to not make art, but rather to artistically make something which does not have the goal of being art. There are people in architecture and in product design on both sides of the argument.
Drawing on some explorations by LeShan and Margenau (not artists or art critics, but a psychologist of human development and a physicist/philosopher), my feeling about art is "I know it when I see it." Which is not a good definition where laws are concerned (look where it got pornography), so I don't make laws about it. However, it is mistake to think that because I can't define it precisely that it doesn't exist. For instance, you and I may disagree about when day becomes night (when the sun sets? when it's a certain amount dark? after dinner? 8pm?), but it would be a mistake to surmise that night doesn't exist. In fact, we have a clear idea of what night is. Many of our concepts have this kind of fuzziness at the edges - childhood, for instance, or pain.
Quite often I am more concerned with entertainment or direct communication than creating some kind of liminal space that frees and challenges the recipient through a playful yet holy transport. Other times, I am definitely making art, and to be honest one of the ways I can tell something is art is that it is a bit embarrassing, but this is also a way I can tell something is bad, so I can't say that embarrassment is a good litmus test for art.
I think a good deal of training is helpful, and also confronting the question over and over.
However, I am thinking today that I may be done with the word art, not because I don't think it exists, but because I am tired of it not communicating. There is no substitute word, but at the moment when someone says art they might as well say dadadadada. It is not exactly "um," but it's not "art" either, because it is said without a definition. I similarly abandoned "nature" and "natural" some time back, and more recently "sexy," when I noticed that people would attach "sexy" to anything they wanted me to like, regardless of whether it had anything to do with sex or arousal of me or anyone else. It has probably been ten years since I ascribed meaning to the word "healthy," which is presently applied to a range of products and behaviors, but not to people. None of us are well, as it turns out. Ever. Despite everything we do being healthy - so healthy we should indulge and not feel guilty, which we do because we ourselves are not healthy.
For the moment, you are free to assume at all times that I am behaving in a way that is sexy, healthy, and natural, and that this is art.
Don't we all feel wonderfully affirmed.
* Remember, I am an economist and don't use "capitalist" as an epithet; I use it to describe people who own capital, such as businesses.
