There is one art. Scholars who explain it all to the rest of us don’t see it that way. They divide art up with fences and gates, categories, periods, schools. They do this because that’s the way they’re taught – so much easier to score the tests. By the time they’re done, representational painting and abstract painting are different things, modern and contemporary are separate realms of expression, every year in SoHo has it’s own stars. Actually, the idea of making marks on a flat surface which somehow create 3D pictures in the mind stretches back thirty thousand years we know of, and it’s been going on continually since. Languages require a lot of learning and divide up humanity into regions, tribes, nationalities – the obvious source of many of our problems. Art goes in directly. Fifty percent of the brain interprets vision and eighty percent of the circuits connect in some way, according to tv documentaries. Art needs no translation.
Art has been used to pull many wagons. Early on we think it had to do with hunting, the Egyptians made it talk, the church used it to shape and condition human experience, and we sell stuff with it. Behind it all is this mysterious ability of human perception to animate line and shape on a page. Our purpose here is to deal with the pure stuff, and it doesn’t really matter which box you pull it out of. There are artists all around with something to say, and some create visual images as deep and wide as you have eyes to see.
1 comment:
I'm reminded of a favorite past time - making analogies between, say, art, music, and literature. These analogies hold up pretty well, but I'm not opposed to somebody pointing out how they fall short. But the point I want to make is this: The more I listen to music, and play music - and I've spent a lifetime collecting and learning music from all genres, and all corners of the earth - and, the more I read, from that same well-spring of history, experience, and culture, I realize that it all comes from the same place, the same shared human experience. If I read your essay correctly, then, let's agree to have a broad definition of art and let the viewer, with his pre-disposition for "seeing", accept it or reject it. Now if this same viewer wants to enjoy a great novel with many levels of meaning, or enjoy the multi-leveled richness of a Miles Davis composition, or expand his ability to enjoy a work of art - let him educate himself (warily), and in the case of art - fine tune his education - by looking. --Steve Armstrong
Post a Comment