Post
by iamfanboy » Sun Oct 22, 2006 12:59 am
Art is really simple: It's using symbols to communicate emotions or thoughts. Words are art (novels), motions are art (dancing, acting), and drawing is art.
Yep, that means that everyone, whether they mean to or no, creates art. What sets an artist apart is that they're consciously aware of it and have focused their inherent need to communicate into a specific area, like painting, acting, or yes, smearing crap all over the wall.
I'm not sure how it depreciates art to categorize it. I personally think that it's liberating; it lets you understand it, to step back and see it in a grander picture than your own eyes would allow.
What I think you mean is, "To put (X Artist) in the realm of (X style) and never look at him other than as (X style) is degrading and wrong; it locks your mind into a cage when looking at art when it should be free and open."
But it all does sound like a rather pretentious notion in one bite, no?
There's a good reason to follow this line of thought through, though.
Right now (in a historical sense) art is at a cusp. Things will be shifting radically in the next two or three decades in what we consider to be art and whom we consider to be artists, and it's something that people on this website should be aware of, because this website is a part of the paradigm shift. A small part, to be sure, but a part nonetheless, and whether your videos are appreciated in the future or outlawed will rest on how it all shakes out.
At no other time in human history has it been EVER been easier to access art, any kind of art. Five hundred years ago, an art student would have had to journey across Europe to be exposed to the masters. A hundred years ago, he would have had to go to the library - and then, his exposure would have been limited to only what was put into the books, at a time when Michaelangelo's David was censored in one out of every two books! Nowadays, this imaginary student could just type in a quick search and come up with hundreds or thousands of images...
The side effects of that, of course, is oversaturation of common images (that dumb kid with the lightsaber a couple of years back?), thievery for profit, and the backlash from the people who had it good under the previous system, like Metallica during the big mp3 flap, which is still going on.
As a side note, my best friend predicted what would happen the MOMENT that he first heard about the .mp3 format, in 1997, five years before it became national news and six (or seven?) years before Napster was closed down. That's why it's important to have a sense of how the now/i] will relate to the future, which is kinda what this thread is leading up to.
(I evolve my threads rather than saying everything at once, because it just takes too long to do it all at once, it looks boring, and it doesn't allow for the input of other people, which is NECESSARY for the development of good ideas.)
And there's nothing wrong with masturbatory art. Pollack is a good artist. Hard to understand, but good.
Doujinshi is (as an example) a masturbatory art form; it's created solely by the artist, to the artist's wishes, and while he brings enough to sell at conventions, he rarely makes a profit on it unless he's already famous or popular in some way. Ditto fanfiction; I don't think anyone writes a fanfiction (unless it's an Inuyasha fanfic ^_^) thinking, "This will make me POPULAR!"
And yet, a couple of the best stories that I've ever read have been fanfiction. I'm impatiently waiting for the Kimigabuchi circle to put out the next volume of their Evangelion doujinshi series, because it's how the story of Evangelion should have gone on. OMFG it is SO good, and the English translation is relatively decent, too.
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