Filed under: Art n Stuff
art 1 |ärt| noun 1 the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power
I was at a bbq on Saturday when I was asked by an older man, what is the purpose of art? the first thing that this makes me think about when this question is asked to me is, ‘why is this man questioning eveything around him?’ Quite simply everything was generated at one time or another through expression, imagination and human creative skill. It would seem that in this age though the artistic merits of a common house, a car or the job that an ever replaceable workmen provides is forgotten and purely perceived as useful due to the convenience they provide. Thus placing ‘art’ into a void that is considered hard to understand or useless due to the only service it provides at first glance is aesthetics.
I find it funny how alot of people upon leaving school continue to carry on with habits they’ve generated in school from the days of Science or Maths. If you ask most children in high school, ‘why don’t you like maths or science?’ they will 1st say because, ‘it’s dumb, it’s stupid’ but when you get to the roots of the reason you will find it’s because they don’t understand it. The same goes with any thing creative ‘artistic’. If it’s not a beautiful photo realistic landscape painting or a photo of a lighthouse getting pounded with water it’s too hard to understand. Ever closed your eyes and looked at the sun? and then tried to paint the gradient of yellows you can see, this has just as much merit as the lighthouse.
My opinion is that ‘art’ can be anything you want it to be, you just need to change the context of the most simplest material, a tree, a blade of grass, a dog shit and it can be a metaphor or mean something else or you can close your eyes and throw paint on a canvas, at the end of the day it’s self initiated self expression, something we’ve lost, just look at most of society these days, we’re walking billboards with other peoples art, other peoples company logos other peoples shit….. Art challenges people, and these days more than any before I feel we are fucking lazy, we get told what to do by our governments, we are influenced by the media our peers etc. etc. and maybe art is the first step to regaining some independance. At the least art is one of the few things that each individual can perceive without intervention and can freely interpret without being wrong.
And if you’ve read all this and you still think it’s shit good on you, I’ll say this;
1. When was the last time you spontaneously expressed yourself without encouragement, without ambiguity and just because you followed your sense or desire, bearing in mind subconscious influences?
