When I was in college, we had a group of skinny white boy literature majors. They looked like they might do heroin and they certainly never went out during sunlight hours. One professor nicknamed them the po-mo boys. Sort of like the Peep o' Day Boys I suppose...I think that would have been a cleverer name for them.
Anyways, the one question we all obsessed about in an earnest sort of way was the nature of Art. Except the po-mo boys. They just lounged about looking ethereal and jaded all at the same time. I suppose they were being Art. We were a pretty conservative college and our professors encouraged us to engage with "age-old questions" and encouraged us to believe that long and deep thought on things like the nature of Art would make us wise.
So my thinking on Art evolved to point where I decided that Art required an audience. By that I mean that Art is a form of communication and an artist creates in the hope that someday somewhere someone will get what the artist has said or meant. But then there are a whole bunch of pathways you can take from that idea that I don't have time for today. Isak Dineson and Billy Collins both play with that idea in different ways. Of course Shakespeare's the Tempest is about that. In the visual arts, the Dutch artists seem to enjoy joking on the subject. Music is a bit trickier considering that most people experience it as a soundtrack to other events rather than something you sit and listen too. I suppose Rock is a democratic art form and musicians don't mind that they create art for people to hum along to rather than contemplate.
And then there are blogs. I'm not sure if a blog can be a work of art. The nice and yet terrifying thing about comments is that you can get feedback that lets you know whether people are getting it or not. And maybe Art is not a personal thing. Maybe it's more about yelling out into the cosmos than the audience. Or maybe the audience needs to be an abstract thing in the artist's mind.
Thinking and creating art are two different things. So maybe blogs (at any rate this blog) are too analytical. Maybe art needs a little mystery. Maybe the reason I think that po-mo boys were creating art with their lives is that they were silent.
2 comments:
I personally think art can only be described in cultural context. While this might sound like a liberal or postmodern approach it isn't. For instance, "art" is often stamped on an object, as a label, across the boundaries of culture. Say a certain tribesman in Africa makes ritual objects to use in native religion. The ritual objects aren't "art" to him--they have a definite religious functional purpose (contrast with a Jackson Pollack in the MOMA). Then a white anthropologist comes and collects a bunch of these ritual objects and takes them home. Now people in the anthropologist's country begin to recognize these objects as "art" and seek more. The tribesman sets up shop churning out "art" but to him they are still functional--a means of getting two coins to rub together. The idea of art exists in the mind of the buyer not the maker. Alternately the PoMo boys make their banal art and think about how deep it is but no one will buy it. Neither is really art. Art perhaps is that rare situation where both the maker and the audience perceive it as art and embrace it. Say a Flannery O'Connor short story or a Goya painting. This is a narrow subset of all the things that pretend to art or are labelled as art but I think it is a good working definition, that relies on 1) the intent of the maker, 2) the intent of the audience.
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