As a student at Uni, studying Literature, Art History, Acting and Communications, I fell into lots of discussions around how one defined “Art.” Nowadays, I live with a photographer & web manager with an art history degree. Suffice it to say, we have this discussion all the time. Sadly, we are never closer to resolution.
It seems that everyone and their dog calls what they do “art.” OK, I’ll go along with that, but I wonder if they’ve ever thought about what that means.
Few of us would argue that paint by numbers is art. As a knitter, I don’t believe that knitting from a pattern is, either. But knitting further complicates this for me by introducing the idea of “craft.” Then, of course, there is that much derided term “hobby.”
As a fan of the official “Arts & Crafts” movement of the early 20th century, I see craft as the act of building something homemade, low-tech and functional. Crafts people, traditionally, have fit this bill: blacksmiths, cabinet makers, shoemakers, weavers etc. Crafters possessed finely honed skills, and communities depended on them. Extremely skilled crafts people might have been blessed with the title “artisan.” These people were seen as approaching the “artists,” who were, in turn, the people (men, I should say) who painted cathedral ceilings. The term “high art” was reserved for the purely visual arts, of course. By these definitions, tole painting and its like are totally not in the game. Enter the word “hobby.”
OK. We have all the words on the table, so let’s go back to art. My mate argues that art must transcend a celebration of the day-to-day and tell a story. He claims that too much of what we describe as art is merely chronicalling life. He calls this archivism rather than art. When we look at breathtakingly beautiful pictures of flowers or scenery or even design, he acknowledges its beauty, but remains unmoved. I, on the other hand, am more emotional, an experience of extreme beauty can bring me to tears. I fall into beauty and let it wrap itself around me. It is one of the great pleasures of life.
Here is where our definitions intersect. I argue that art must speak to you in such a way that it transforms you. It must alter your reality such that it lives in you forever, consciously or unconsciously changing your perspective. Does an artistic experience make you say “that’s nice (exciting, shocking, whatever) and then move on? Or do you hold your experience of the art in your chest and let it work it’s magic on you? Are you changed, even imperceptibly by it?
An old friend of mine has been studying with a very famous photographer. He’s been producing some very technically impressive photographs, definitely magazine worthy. Indeed, you just need to look at them to appreciate the skill and craft involved. He knows he has moved well beyong a mere hobby, and, believes, not surprisingly, that he is now an artist. But here’s the problem for me: I admire his skill, but his images leave me unmoved. Like Brian, I see skilled chronicalling. It’s like looking at yet another cookie cutter Hollywood movie star. Yeah, yeah – they’re structurally perfect. No argument. But they do not SPEAK to me. They tell no stories and they’re beauty doesn’t change me.
It all came to a head when I cancelled the cable TV. I’ve been outrageously busy at school, and found that I was reassessing not only where I spent my time, but what I wanted out of it. The world is overflowing with stimuli: images, sounds and experiences. They say one single copy of the New York Times contains more information that a person of the middle ages would assimilate in a lifetime. ADD and stress disorders run rampant in our society. Watching an ADD friend of mine spend compulsive hours a day pouring over websites and twitter, I realized that we are simply overloaded. So much so that we have stopped taking the time to ponder, to wonder, and to sit with ideas. We sit in chairs so comfortable we lose sense of our own bodies. We walk a few feet to a metal box that hands us all manner of flavours that we barely taste. Media flows out of other boxes and drowns our minds in bites upon bites of sensory stimuli. We have lost any expectation that we might assimilate it all. TV, commercials, radio, adequate novels, textbooks, websites, email, phone calls, RSS feeds. Everywhere you go, background music, traffic noise, and oh so many flickers of light. The everyday churn of the information machine relentlessly drowns out the practice of reflection that truly allows an artistic experience. Worthy though some of this information may be, the sheer volume of it defeats that opportunity to explore it. One day I realized: Where was beauty of silence and darkness? Where was dance of a dust mote in sunlight? When was last time sat still, pondering something truly enriching?
So perhaps you sense how this fits into The Brightness of Being. To live well, I determined, was to take the time to slow down and really allow time for things that would move and change me to do their work. Enter the need to determine what I wanted and what I did not. (And small, pattern oriented human animal that I am, I needed definitions.) I walked around the house and touched things. I touched books that really weren’t worth reading, “cute” ornaments with no artistic (or even much sentimental) value, funny gifts that resources should not have been wasted on, piles and piles of mass produced “stuff” that did little but comfort my materialistic leanings. Where was the skill, the craft, the art? The truly artistic, truly meaningful items were overwhelmed by it all. As I held a copy of Michael Ondaatje’s Divisidero in my hands, I thought “Why do I waste my precious life attending to all this crap, when there is art like this? Should I not take the time to savour this experience?”
Someone once said “Never have anything in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” I would change that a little by changing “beautiful” to “artistic,” and that wherever possible we should aim for items that are both. Do the things and stimuli around you truly nourish your being or enrich your life? That in itself is being useful. If not, why do we keep them?
Do you believe these distinctions are something we would all do well to consider? To coin a cliché, “Less is More.” Do you need to unclutter your life to touch this richness of experience? How do you define what are meaningful stimuli and what merely pretty distractions? What can we all do to honor the artistic feast that surrounds our precious lives?
5 Responses
April 19th, 2009 at 11:23 am
There’s alot to think about here. The modern concept of art vs craft goes back to William Morris and those in the Pre-Raphaelite circles. Morris was of the opinion that functional objects needed the beauty (the art). That has long since gone, in the generations that followed, even by the time it caught on across the Atlantic with Stickley. Craft was how it was seen, even then.
The idea of archivists is an interesting one. I’m not sold on the need to ‘tell a story’ in some way for the work to be considered to have artistic merit, though. There does however, have to be intent to convey something, either a message, or an atmosphere, mood, that goes beyond the finished (or unfinished) piece. The whole has to be more than the sum of it’s parts, on purpose. It’s the ephemeral bits that shake you, that you hold on to.
April 19th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
I wonder if this quote could not be just as applicable if one exchanged Truth with Art…
“Truth is generated from its environment; in that way it becomes a powerful reality. From this point of view, studying the imprint of the truth is more important than the truth itself. The truth doesn’t need a handle.”
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
April 19th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Yes, Herb I quite agree with you. It’s that marriage of function and beauty that I’m trying to convey when I say that objects should be, ideally, both beautiful and useful. As for the “story” in art, I’m afraid I use that term rather broadly, but you seem to understand my intent. Love what you say “It’s the ephemeral bits that shake you” - it will wander around my head for the rest of the day, I suspect. Thanks for posting.
April 20th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Tolstoy is said to have called art “the use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another.”
April 20th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
The first thing that came to mind after reading the Tolstoy quote was the question: What is it that we are communicating, as a culture, to our own as well as other cultures?
It kind of ties in to the sheer amount of media being generated. If taken as a whole, is there an identity, or a message in there? If not, how do we sort through the mass(es?) to find the work that is worth considering?
Semi random thoughts…
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