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.

Pictures are Worth a Thousand Words

I don't really know how to define art.  To me, art is a picture on a wall.  I like landscape pictures, normal ones that tell you exactly what you are looking at.  The abstract ones that have crazy colors and you stare at it for hours trying to figure out what it is?  I don't like them.  I like simple, plain backgrounds.  People are okay, but I prefer ones without them.

I'm not sure if that says anything about art.  But this post is going to be super short.  Sorry about that.

My definition is apparently 'Most things except for art'

I've always believed that art was something that made you feel emotions. Music is art. Books are art. Video games are art. Oddly, the only thing I was never sure was "art" under my definition is actual fine art like paintings and such.

So I guess the other thing about art is that it takes creativity to produce. Arithmetic is not art. Anyone could get that 2+2=4 (and anyone who doesn't is wrong), but developing a mathematical proof? That's art. That involves delicately weaving ideas through facts and melding assumptions and hypotheses into a unified concept, one that's solid and can stand the test of time. "Mathematics is the poetry of logical ideas."

Along this similar line, it's always baffled me how video games being art is even a debate. Even more so with the idea of "Can a video game make you cry?" Well duh it can. I can list 5 examples off the top of my head (Professor Layton, Crisis Core, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy VIII, Mother 3). Existentials are always really easy to prove. You just need one example and bam, the question of "Does a video game exist that can make you cry?" is proven true. Yes, there are some games that are very straight-forward (Move left, jump on baddies), and there are many, many games that involve characters with in-depth motivations and personalities going through an involved plot in a carefully constructed setting. I fail to see any difference between that and a novel, except for the beauty of interactivity allowing the player to contribute to shaping the story.

The fact is that fine art such as drawings and paintings and sculptures does require creativity. You have to take something from within yourself and shape it into something real and that makes it art. To be honest, though, it's never really called to me. My only reaction to museums has been an overwhelming desire to find where they're selling food and then to be offended by the exorbitant prices they're selling it for. I've been to a notable amount of art museums and I cannot tell you a single thing that has interested me. The only thing that even comes close is that one giant Lego city in that one dive bar in the Florida Keys. That was fascinating and engaging and told a story. Several stories, really, and one of which involved Harry Potter fighting Godzilla. To me, art needs to make me feel something, and even though a sculpture has never made me feel anything (aside from technically impressed), there are obviously people who feel that way. That is enough to make it art even if it isn't in my own personal little world.

In sum, I think pretty much anything can be art if it requires creativity and if it means things to people (preferably people other than the creator, but I guess not necessarily). I feel like programming is art. Not just design but taking characters and grouping them together into commands that, when compiled, produce an actual working application...that couldn't be more beautiful to me. Someone else might disagree, but I feel like the fact that anyone really believes that something is art means it is.

That said, where are my video game museums?

But he isn't wearing any clothes!

I think it would be appropriate to begin my entry for this week by saying that the only thing I actually know about visual art is that I either like something or I don’t.  But either way, regardless of whether the majority of people like a creation, whether it be visual or acoustic, it can still be regarded as art, in my opinion, as long as it evokes some kind of emotion from the people who experience either seeing or hearing it. 

When I first read our topic for this week, one particular artist came to my mind.  About a year or so ago, I went with a small group to see a travelling exhibit of some of Pablo Picasso’s works that had come into our area.  I said earlier that I am not an art expert, and I’ll add on to that statement by saying that I haven’t studied Picasso since my last elementary school art class, so I knew next to nothing about the artist before we went to the show.  But we knew that an exhibit like that wouldn’t likely come anywhere close to our area anytime soon.  So, why not go see it?  Anyway, the exhibit was pretty massive, and it had a number of Picasso’s works from the many different periods of his artistic life, starting with the earliest and moving progressively.  I thought that most of his earlier works didn’t look like what we think of today as typical Picasso.  And maybe I’m a little bit boring, but my favorite piece in the entire exhibit was in one of the first rooms; it was called “La Celestine.”  I don’t even really know why it was my favorite, other than the fact that I was really intrigued by the elderly woman in the painting and I wanted to know more about what her back story was, even if the painting wasn’t done from life and the subject was completely fictional.  I also sensed a kind of eerie tone in the portrait with the lighting and positioning of the figure.  This piece is an example of what I think is art.  I was intrigued by it, even though I didn’t love enough to want it in my house. 

As we continued on through the exhibit and into one of the last rooms that contained Picasso’s later works, we saw another piece that kind of stumped us as to why it was even put in the exhibit.  It was a bicycle seat and handlebars welded together entitled “Bull’s Head”.  None of us understood how this piece was considered a work of art, especially compared to the other works or art in the collection.  I started to think if it was like the situation from "The Emperor's New Clothes." I don't know enough to say for certain, but I wondered if maybe the joke was on us and there really wasn't anything to this piece other than the fact that Picasso made it.  But, apparently someone with artistic credentials thought it was important enough to be included in the exhibit, so maybe the qualities that made the piece a work of art was that Picasso was the first person to think to create it, and it’s controversial, so it elicits emotion from those who see it.  I guess the jury is still out on this piece.  I thought it was interesting, but I don’t know if anyone would have called it “art” if it had been created by a random person who knows how to weld and wanted to make something out of parts of a old bicycle for whatever reason.  But I don’t want to entirely write off this piece either, because there had to be some kind of creativity behind the creation of it.  It’s certainly not something I think any random person would come up with and think to construct.  It’s certainly something I wouldn’t have thought of. 

I know this post is already running long, but I didn’t want to finish without bringing up one last musing.  Jackson Pollock.  One of the most controversial and widely known artists to date.  A few years ago, I stumbled upon a documentary called “Who the @#$% is Jackson Pollock?”  I ended up watching the majority of the film because I thought the premise looked interesting.  This documentary followed a retired female truck driver on her quest to find out if the painting she bought for a few dollars at a yard sale was indeed an authentic Jackson Pollock painting.  In fact, at the time of purchase, the woman was unaware of who Jackson Pollock was.  It was her son (I think, it’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie) who encouraged her to have the painting examined and appraised.  So on her son’s advice, she took the painting to a number of art/ Pollock experts, and some believed the painting may be authentic while others believed it wasn’t. 

So, getting back to the point of the discussion, art experts told her that the painting would be worth a great deal of money if it was real, but it would be worth next to nothing if it wasn’t.  And I guess this is really a scenario of determining value rather than what the intrinsic worth of art is, but either way, shouldn’t art be worth something other than a price attached to the name of its creator?  I remember hearing that Pollock had an interesting process for creating his paintings, but I don’t know what it is that sets him so far apart from the rest.  Not to bash his creative process in any way, I can’t really do that when I don’t understand what it is myself.  I guess my point is that a huge component of how we figure what should be classified as art is the process behind its creation.  So, it seems to me the reactions any given piece elicits from those who experience it and the creative process behind the creation is what classifies something as art.  How we as a society choose to value art seems to be an entirely separate process.      

"Modern art" is stupid.

So, art.

I took exactly one art class while at school, and that was only because it was mandatory.  It was a long time ago, so I don't remember a lot of the exact details, but one thing in particular stood out to me.  I hate looking at art as some kind of competition.  When we were given a specific thing to create, I couldn't help but compare my finished product to the others, and art is one of the very few things where I almost completely lack any sort of self-confidence.  There was always something better about other people's works than mine.  That still exists, to this day... but we might visit that a bit later in the post.

The only project that I remember from that art class is one where we were studying Egyptian death masks.  The subject itself was interesting to me, and the project was to create our own masks out of clay.  There was no "right" or "wrong" way to make a mask (beyond the obvious, anyway).  I really enjoyed that assignment, because I didn't have to worry about... well, anything, other than how I wanted it to look.  The end result was multi-colored (where most other masks were monochromatic), and I even used a bit of extra clay to make tear-like-things below the eyes. Why?  I don't know, I wanted to at the time, and it didn't matter.  I got an A on the assignment.

Art, to me, is pretty simple.  Art is entertainment.  Art is an expression of emotions.  The saying "A picture is worth a thousand words" is so, so true, as long as the person who made the picture put their heart into it.  I know several people who can draw things several million times better than I could ever hope to.  Despite this, when I put a real amount of time into drawing something (which is usually, at most, once a week, for the weekly schedule decoration), I take a fairly large amount of pride in it.  Yes, other people could do it better, and yes, it's not great, but I like what I did.  Will my work(s) ever be displayed in a museum?  Hell no.  Are they still something that I consider "art"?  Absolutely.

I used to do a lot of animated stick figure stuff.  I still have a fair number of them saved in various places online.  Stick figures are absolutely not what anyone would instinctively think of as "art"... but again, I put a lot of time and effort into each of those, and I'm proud of them.  Does art have to be fancy, with advanced techniques and massive amounts of detail, to be acceptable?  I don't think so.  I actually prefer simple art.  Sometimes things don't need to be perfect to be pleasing.

This was kind of a random post, but I hope that I've gotten at least a few of my thoughts across.  In my opinion, art is very simply a means of expressing creativity and emotion that both the creator and others can find enjoyable.  It's nice when art makes sense, but it isn't always necessarily a requirement.  ... Except for modern art.  Modern art is stupid.

Week of 7/1 - What is Art?

Welcome to July! We're kicking off this month with a somewhat different topic: What is art?

Art is something that isn't clearly defined, and this week we're going to try to explore what art means for each of us. This week is going to be less about forming a convincing opinion on a subject and more about personal experience, and I'm interested to see what everyone has to say.

John will be kicking the week off tomorrow, and I'll be back on Saturday to finish it off. Enjoy!