- Joined
- Mar 18, 2007
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Serious thread. Perhaps the first I've made in a while.
I'd post this in Medivh's Tower, but I've grown to believe that place is useless.
If you've the patience and the desire to read my relatively large paragraphs and respond accordingly, by all means. If you don't, piss off. This is a concept that bypasses group membership in my opinion.
Y'See, the concept of art has been bothering me lately. I used to adhere by a definition introduced to me by Hakeem. To paraphrase, "Art is stuff made by artists. If it isn't made by artists, it isn't art. It's other stuff."
That is to say, art is simply an arbitrary term without any meaning more profound than what you see.
However, the more I think about it, the more I believe this term requires further scrutiny, and to come to a proper definition, I must lay out the conditions and trends that come with art.
To begin with, I continue to believe that art is first and foremost an intelligent creation. I don't think you can look at the Grand Canyon and say "Wow, that is beautiful; must be a work of art," unless you truly believe it had an intelligent creator of any kind. This is just my personal conviction. That it was created is the most basic trait of all art.
That being established, if it was intelligently created, then it must serve a purpose. Everyone has had an intent when trying to create something. And to define art as a single, constant term, it must serve at least one common intent that unifies them.
So art is an intelligent creation that serves some kind of purpose.
But what kind of purpose? Well, for that I look to the works and words commonly associated with art. Literature, poetry, music and the like. If there's one phrase you commonly hear alongside all kinds of art, it's "thought-provoking". "Beauty" works as well, but that's something used to describe the quality of art, which I will delve into later.
This brings me to my final definition:
Art is an intelligent creation that serves to educate.
From the less subtle like John Steinbeck to the batshit crazy like Jackson Pollack, artists have always had used their art as a medium to bring to you a different perspective on reality. You see the world in a significantly different light after experiencing something that truly moves you. This, I believe, is what makes art art.
This raises a new question. Since everything you see or do changes your life in some way, isn't everything art? My answer is a resounding "Kinda." Everything intelligently created serves to change your life a bit, so it all has, to some extent, artistic potency. What's different is the amount of artistic potency.
And like a motryoshka of confusion, this, in turn, raises a new question: "What determines artistic potency?" or "What determines beauty in art?" If art educates, why isn't a textbook the greatest piece of all? Well, as we go deeper and deeper into this concept, I become increasingly unsure, but nonetheless, here is my proposal: Artistic quality is determined by how far the piece as "moved" you. That is, how much the piece has intentionally taught you and made you accept. If you've been deeply "moved" by the vivid imagery of the brutality of slavery Frederick Douglass describes in the narrative of his life, and you now see the plight of the slaves in a completely different light, the author has done his job, and I think this determines the artistic quality of his book.
I do not know how textbooks fit into the equation, and perhaps they might serve as a counterexample to my definition. I can only reason that in the case of textbooks, the user not only actively seeks to learn, but knows exactly what he will learn, and so it doesn't fit the artistic model. This is a less-than-perfect idea though.
Finally, I'd like to discuss the elitism of artists. Some people say that there are too many poets in the world, and that people will value them more if there are, in fact, less poets in the world. This is like saying that the world will be a better place if only some people are given education and everyone else is left to toil in the fields under the tyranny of the educated. Indeed, just as writing a textbook prompts further research and curiosity, by searching one's experiences and emotions when they make art, they too improve by its creation. To rival John Mayer in pretentious artsy bullshit, I will go so far as to say the world might be a better place if everyone wrote a bit of poetry now and then.
Some people believe art needs to be complex. It can't appease the lowest common denominator; it must be full of puzzles and intricacy and ambiguous symbols. Back to the analogy to typical education, I would say this is like declaring that all education must only be taught at the highest degree, and that you either start off learning calculus, or don't learn math at all, because to dumb down math would be an insult to its existence. Again, this kind of elitist view is unproductive. High brow or low brow, professional or amateur, all art is welcomed, and the kind that appeals to the majority of the people may perhaps be the best kind, because it is able to educate and "move" the greatest number of people. The quality of a teacher is determined by how well they can teach even the dumbest of students. I believe this applies to artists as well.
In closing, art educates, and that's what makes it worthwhile. I once heard that left-handed people are more apt to become mathematicians than right-handed people. The problem with this is that being left-handed often means you are right-brained, which is commonly associated with creativity and fanciful ideas as opposed to rationality and pragmatism. The reason for such a trend is because math requires more creativity than most jobs. It is commonly associated with being practical, but even more prominent in a mathematician is one's ability to grasp foreign concepts and think in a way beyond convention. In a similar, perhaps opposite way, I have deconstructed art logically, and whether you think this is enlightening or trivial and just plain wrong, I hope this has been more useful in your understanding of art than some hippie wailing away on an acoustic guitar.
So what do you guys think? Comments? Complaints? Compliments? Corrections? Criticism?
I'd post this in Medivh's Tower, but I've grown to believe that place is useless.
If you've the patience and the desire to read my relatively large paragraphs and respond accordingly, by all means. If you don't, piss off. This is a concept that bypasses group membership in my opinion.
Y'See, the concept of art has been bothering me lately. I used to adhere by a definition introduced to me by Hakeem. To paraphrase, "Art is stuff made by artists. If it isn't made by artists, it isn't art. It's other stuff."
That is to say, art is simply an arbitrary term without any meaning more profound than what you see.
However, the more I think about it, the more I believe this term requires further scrutiny, and to come to a proper definition, I must lay out the conditions and trends that come with art.
To begin with, I continue to believe that art is first and foremost an intelligent creation. I don't think you can look at the Grand Canyon and say "Wow, that is beautiful; must be a work of art," unless you truly believe it had an intelligent creator of any kind. This is just my personal conviction. That it was created is the most basic trait of all art.
That being established, if it was intelligently created, then it must serve a purpose. Everyone has had an intent when trying to create something. And to define art as a single, constant term, it must serve at least one common intent that unifies them.
So art is an intelligent creation that serves some kind of purpose.
But what kind of purpose? Well, for that I look to the works and words commonly associated with art. Literature, poetry, music and the like. If there's one phrase you commonly hear alongside all kinds of art, it's "thought-provoking". "Beauty" works as well, but that's something used to describe the quality of art, which I will delve into later.
This brings me to my final definition:
Art is an intelligent creation that serves to educate.
From the less subtle like John Steinbeck to the batshit crazy like Jackson Pollack, artists have always had used their art as a medium to bring to you a different perspective on reality. You see the world in a significantly different light after experiencing something that truly moves you. This, I believe, is what makes art art.
This raises a new question. Since everything you see or do changes your life in some way, isn't everything art? My answer is a resounding "Kinda." Everything intelligently created serves to change your life a bit, so it all has, to some extent, artistic potency. What's different is the amount of artistic potency.
And like a motryoshka of confusion, this, in turn, raises a new question: "What determines artistic potency?" or "What determines beauty in art?" If art educates, why isn't a textbook the greatest piece of all? Well, as we go deeper and deeper into this concept, I become increasingly unsure, but nonetheless, here is my proposal: Artistic quality is determined by how far the piece as "moved" you. That is, how much the piece has intentionally taught you and made you accept. If you've been deeply "moved" by the vivid imagery of the brutality of slavery Frederick Douglass describes in the narrative of his life, and you now see the plight of the slaves in a completely different light, the author has done his job, and I think this determines the artistic quality of his book.
I do not know how textbooks fit into the equation, and perhaps they might serve as a counterexample to my definition. I can only reason that in the case of textbooks, the user not only actively seeks to learn, but knows exactly what he will learn, and so it doesn't fit the artistic model. This is a less-than-perfect idea though.
Finally, I'd like to discuss the elitism of artists. Some people say that there are too many poets in the world, and that people will value them more if there are, in fact, less poets in the world. This is like saying that the world will be a better place if only some people are given education and everyone else is left to toil in the fields under the tyranny of the educated. Indeed, just as writing a textbook prompts further research and curiosity, by searching one's experiences and emotions when they make art, they too improve by its creation. To rival John Mayer in pretentious artsy bullshit, I will go so far as to say the world might be a better place if everyone wrote a bit of poetry now and then.
Some people believe art needs to be complex. It can't appease the lowest common denominator; it must be full of puzzles and intricacy and ambiguous symbols. Back to the analogy to typical education, I would say this is like declaring that all education must only be taught at the highest degree, and that you either start off learning calculus, or don't learn math at all, because to dumb down math would be an insult to its existence. Again, this kind of elitist view is unproductive. High brow or low brow, professional or amateur, all art is welcomed, and the kind that appeals to the majority of the people may perhaps be the best kind, because it is able to educate and "move" the greatest number of people. The quality of a teacher is determined by how well they can teach even the dumbest of students. I believe this applies to artists as well.
In closing, art educates, and that's what makes it worthwhile. I once heard that left-handed people are more apt to become mathematicians than right-handed people. The problem with this is that being left-handed often means you are right-brained, which is commonly associated with creativity and fanciful ideas as opposed to rationality and pragmatism. The reason for such a trend is because math requires more creativity than most jobs. It is commonly associated with being practical, but even more prominent in a mathematician is one's ability to grasp foreign concepts and think in a way beyond convention. In a similar, perhaps opposite way, I have deconstructed art logically, and whether you think this is enlightening or trivial and just plain wrong, I hope this has been more useful in your understanding of art than some hippie wailing away on an acoustic guitar.
So what do you guys think? Comments? Complaints? Compliments? Corrections? Criticism?