Does Anybody Actually Like Visual Art?

Art is a tricky thing. Our goal this week was to figure out what it is, and of course, I cheated. My first instinct was to go to dictionary.com and start looking for my favorite definition, which is pretty much how high school debate works. Everything it gave me was... kind of useless. It was all too vague. There had to be a good definition somewhere that I could base my post on.

Actually, who am I kidding? If art wasn't such a ridiculously vague idea, we wouldn't need a week's worth of posts to discuss what it is. So much for that approach.

I think that there are too many unnecessary connotations tied to the idea of art. Almost everybody so far has gone straight to visual art as a focus for their discussion, and that makes sense, because in elementary school they send us to art class and we play with crayons for an hour and that's art. There are those guys a long time ago that painted or drew or carved some pretty cool things that are supposed to carry a lot of meaning, and I'm sure that they do, but it doesn't really evoke any kind of emotional response from me, most of the time.

A lot of the definitions that I looked at dealt with the idea of beauty and ideals, and the first thing that came to mind was this.

Math is beautiful. I can already hear people groaning, but those people are wrong. Mathematics is the most basic and pure entity in the entire universe, and there's not really any way around that. In the immortal words of Vi Hart, "Simple rules, complex consequences." It's practically a requirement for high school algebra students to just take a few minutes to play with the different kinds of functions that they can put into their graphing calculators, just to see what kinds of things they can make. My desktop background right now is a rendering of the Mandelbrot set from Wikipedia. Why? Because math is beautiful. I could go on about this for a while, but let's get back to figuring out what art is.

Another huge idea behind art that isn't really addressed by the simple beauty definition is the idea of expression. The way I see the world, art needs to be able to convey some kind of emotional meaning. It needs to forge a connection between the artist and the audience. It needs to give some kind of deeper look at the nature of either of those parties, or perhaps just the world at large. It just needs to say something, and this is where modern art fails miserably.

I'm not a person that really thinks about art all that often, but when I do, I think the key factor that I judge it on is what it makes me feel and how intensely it evokes that feeling. John'll have a new topic for us tomorrow. Have an awesome week, and try not to spend too much time counting the spirals on all of the plants you encounter.