Well, the actual holiday for me is over, but I still get a nice, semi-long break. Cool. I hope everyone had awesome holidays and got nice gifts and feelings and experiences! I got some water colors, but they weren't the kind I was looking for, so I'm just going to go out myself and buy some haha. I miss drawing.
(Okay, now, the rest of this journal is a little pointless and maybe hard to wrap the mind around. Looking back, I don't even know why I wrote it, but whateverrr.)
Anyway, I think this showed up in everyone's inbox-- this article about conceptual art. It's really interesting looking through the comments to see what people think is and isn't art.
It got me thinking and wondering, why are they even commenting? Why is anyone replying to this? Because a lot of people were pushing their opinions on what is and isn't art, and I just think that's so weird that people still do that. Because everyone has their own views on what art is.
Personally, I can see anything as art based on how I think of it. So yes, I think Duchamp's Fountain is art. If people say he was making a statement on how art is crap, well, isn't that a rather artistic statement? But either way, how do they know what Duchamp was trying to say? They didn't talk to him. And what is art to Duchamp may not be art to someone else. That doesn't mean it's not art, and that doesn't mean it is art.
Art is a human creation because art is simply perception. Just like language. It was made by us, but there are different connotations because people are different.
For our Ap Comp&Lit final, we had a class discussion about madness in literature. But the conversation got nowhere because everyone had their own definition of madness, and the difference between madness and insanity, and if there even is a difference. I determined that if you put every student's definition of madness together, you could justify every person in the world as being mad/insane. The word got extremely diluted.
It's the same thing with art. If you combine what everyone thinks art is, everything is art. And just like our class discussion, you can't argue the 'true definition' because it's completely subjective. "Duchamp's Fountain isn't art." Says who? Society? How do you/they know that? And even if it isn't to you, so what? There is no authority telling anyone what art is. Not even the dictionary (which is just a bunch of words getting society to conform in a method of communication). (Because, really; "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance." That doesn't have to mean anything if you don't believe it to.)
Heck, if you think art can only be a creation made solely of fruit, then art is only creations of fruit. That's it. No one can disprove that because nothing has been proven in the first place. What color is the sky? A lot of people say blue. Well, I say it's tissue, because tissue is just a bunch of vocal sounds put together to communicate an association to something. In different languages, they say something else. People who can't or don't speak use a gesture. And on top of it all, people who are blind don't really say anything, because the word blue means something to us but it doesn't mean anything to them. What's art to some people may just be a dirty, meaningless urinal.
What I'm trying to get at here, is everything is subjective and relative and imaginary. It's perception. Those people trying to argue about what makes art? They usually don't try thinking about it in a different way. Sometimes they do. But in the end, what does it matter? What's the point of sharing your opinion, of posting journals like the one I'm posting? I'm not going to say there isn't a point (although it's arguable, I'm sure, because I can't make people realize anything and even if I did it could be easily flipped around; even if people 'realized' or believed in this concept, they would still try pushing their opinions or sharing their beliefs, which is why I didn't reply to anyone on that article). There is a point. I can't say what the point is directly, but partly I feel it's just human nature. I think sometimes we just need something concrete and stable to base our lives on so our minds don't slip and fall apart. And if that means defining something as abstract as art, well, it's impossible to stop anyone from doing so. (I'm doing it myself, trying to make my own ideas into some sort of substance by typing them out.) Maybe we're all just unconsciously trying not to drown in the futility of our existence.
Gosh, I don't know. Maybe everyone should just watch Melancholia and be depressed for the rest of their lives.
Header by lynstrommr!
I will try my best to respond to all of the comments still, but I tend to be a flake so we'll see how that goes.
