"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects like wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."-Tom Stoppard. I think that modern day art is special and specific to our time right now. Sure there is all that art from who knows when of starry nights and women sitting, but we have paintings and sculptures that make no sense. I like the quote. It is saying to me that anyone can be creative and express themselves no matter what. "Art...is the purest expression of human emotion."Tamar Teitelman. How much purer can human kind get than what we have today as art. We have thrown away skill in order to show/portray the rawest of raw emotion. It is a wondrous thing to see what some people might see as sad art. You don't tell from what the people are doing or the landscape of the piece, but from the colors, the jaggedness of the paint strokes or the sculpture. You can see the emotion, and from the art, you yourself can not only feel it, but because it takes little skill, you can recreate it or express yourself like it.
Humans are Fragile things, like Tamar said. "If you shoot it and the bullet goes through its fragile."-Dan Belluscio. We are a fragile people. Even the strongest of us are still fragile. And because we are fragile, death can claim us at any time. We fear death, and some look for it and find it. We look for things to comfort us in life, and that is where we get art. Sure some of it is religious, but what is religion than something for us to explain, and therefor comfort us about, death. "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, so we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?"-William Shakespeare. He knew how it is. We have art that shows our emotions, and some of those emotions are very dark ones. Death is part of human life. It is something everyone must face. It is one thing that makes life so amazing. Art is what we do during that life we are granted. Whether that art be a poem that doesn't rhyme or a piece of art that is so contorted and made of so many different things (or is a nest of hair), it is still art and it is a display of not only emotion but who we are as humans.
The color and expression of a work of art provoke me to deep thoughts also. Art is so objective that who knows how each one of us sees it, though. I could see the blues and greys as a brilliant ocean, while my friend sees it as two bluebirds fighting over food. I love wondering about our creativity and its origin. It must come from emotion, as you said, or else it comes from a higher being maybe? Or possibly it is just from us painting, singing, or sculpting what we see. The question I ask is, does art display who we really are? Or is it, in some cases, a way to cover up who we truely are?
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I do not feel that Art is the purest expression of human emotion. Human emotion itself is tangible, visible, and understandable. Why do people put it through an unnecessary medium through which others may not understand them? I'm not saying that this applies to all art; many pieces are "coherent" in the way they are viewed by others. However, some art, especially abstract art, seems to be a juvenile amalgamation of what the artist believes they "see" in the art, what they think their audience would enjoy, and an increasingly obscene amount of garish colors.
ReplyDeleteI notice you reference the relative fragility of humans, and I have a few thoughts about that. Sure, you can shoot a person, but a bullet may stay inside. Does this make them weak? Does this make them strong? What if their actions had, in no way, influenced the cause of them being shot? This may seem a bit harsh, but you talk about the fragility of the human *body* but then carry on to talk about how people search for emotional comfort. I feel that comparing physical strength with mental strength is like looking at apples and oranges: they're both connected, in a way, but ultimately they are too different.
I do agree with the binding concept of death, though. It is a universal topic that everyone can understand, and it can be used to help others understand one's vantage point on art.
Death is sad, but the sadness helps humans identify with each other, with the human population as a whole.
There is, and has been, a hang-up in the art world (and in the world at large) about abstract art. Just like any genre of art, there is good abstract art, and there is bad abstract art. However, unlike the other art styles, which can be valued by the artist's hand-eye coordination, design sence, and maybe color, abstract art is, well, abstract. Thus, it cannot be valued in this way. Its like the quote by Einstein, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." Abstract art is to technique as the fish is to climbing trees. Theyre irrelevant to each other. What abstract art is all about is not it's abstractness. A really good abstract painting is not necessarilly the most abstract looking painting. That would be judging it by technique. This is what separates the good abstract artists from the bad abstract artists. The good ones get this concept, the bad ones miss the point. A good abstract painting is all about it's meaning, what the artist has to say, or doesn't have to say. It can be pure emotion, or it can be a statement. Its like music,and its like art except instead of hearing it or seeing it, you understand it. (this means that music is an artform too)
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