Thursday, November 08, 2007
Art
I am a complete art novice. Utterly and completely clueless. As such, I’m hesitant to take part in serious conversations about it, because I could only detract from them. So instead, I’ll put my thoughts over here where they won’t get in the way.
As a kid, I was scientific minded, to a fault. Art went completely over my head. I didn’t get it, I didn’t want to get it, I didn’t care to get it. Art museums were boring as all get out, nothing to see here, move along.
That attitude stayed with me for a very long time. It’s only recently that I’ve started to appreciate art, and appreciate it as a medium of communication similar to other things that I better understand.
I’ve come to recognize that there are a lot of different kinds of art. There is art whose sole purpose is to show off the skill of the artist. There is art whose purpose is to record a historical event. There is art whose purpose is to capture visual beauty in the world, to make the artist feel good about themselves, to sell something.
Art whose purpose is to be “pretty” gets only a passing glance from me. I enjoy “pretty” things as much as the next person, but things with only superficial value quickly fade into the background.
Art designed purely to show off the skill of the artist doesn’t do much for me either. Some people try to get really good at something so they can get in the Guinness Book of World Records. Stupid Human Tricks, if you will. Raw skill at virtually anything, be it making towers of playing cards, golf, or painting seems more a curiosity than anything else. Talent and skill is nice, but it’s wasted unless it is used in some meaningful way.
Art designed to make the artist feel good about themselves is mostly worthless. It seems to me that the vast majority of modern art, where the art is so unintelligible as to be meaningless to all but the artist, is worthless to all but the artist. If no one but the artist can tell what the art is supposed to be, then the vast majority of the time, the artist has not added anything to the world by creating it. They might as well leave it in their bedroom, since they are the only one whose life is impacted in any way by it.
The real revelation came to me not all that long ago, when I began to recognize that art could be a vehicle for knowledge in a way that books and music can. Great literature creates a window into a different time and place. It gives the reader a way to step inside the mind of the author, to live in their world for a while, or in some cases, live in a world that they’ve created. Reading great literature is like being immersed in a different culture for a time, and the reader is enlightened by experiencing such a book. Great music, when properly taken in context, can do the exact same thing via a different medium. My revelation, which of course will seem obvious to many and is obvious to me in retrospect, is that great art does the same.
I am not an art critic, and I don’t think I will ever see beauty in art in that way. The beauty that I have found in art, for myself, is the ability of certain pieces of art to educate the observer in profound ways. They are a way for someone perhaps centuries away from either the creation of the piece or the object of the piece to learn about times past, obviously in studying the object of the piece, but more subtly by trying to understand how the object of the piece is distorted by the perceptions and culture of the artist. Such pieces are elements that can be used to piece together the puzzle of what came before, to stand alongside other literature, music, and other cultural items in our attempt to understand what has gone before and how we came to be what we are.
Without having any experience in the cultural institution that is art, I am only able to judge art by what I see as it’s merits. To me, a piece of art is beautiful if it profoundly enlightening in some way, and the visual pleasure it brings is somewhat secondary. It is valuable in how it fits into the continuity of civilization, and how it educates the viewer about a spot on that continuum.
Given my uneducated status, I am enjoying the process of discovery, and the process of rediscovering pieces about which I have known but for which I have now developed a new appreciation.
I have much to learn.
