It seems like everyone has an opinion
on art, but that most discussions on the subject end in the
fashionable question "what is art?" and then the
politically correct statement that "anything can be art",
which is the same as saying that nothing is. If I invent a new
adjective, and say that everything can be described with this word,
then I have invented a useless word that doesn't actually mean
anything helpful.
My own idea is that Art should be made
a separate category from Self Expression. I would suggest that real
Art does not need a blurb, but is self-explanatory to most observers,
and recognisable for what it is meant to portray. This also means
that creating good Art becomes a task of physical skill again,
instead of a mental task of weirding your audience out with bodily
fluids and scrap.
Self Expression could be the category
where a piece exists for the pleasure of the creator, instead of
necessarily for the understanding of the onlooker, which would be an
added bonus. Of course, a Self Expression gallery would be one where
blurbs on each item would be expected, and I imagine that the strange
variety of these creations would draw the same amount of crowds as
the Art galleries. People are drawn to the weird and bizarre as much
as the skillful and impressive.
But does this kind of classification
seem elitist? I suppose it does, if by that you mean it divides
people into one group that have the skill to replicate an image with
a physical medium, and one group who do not have this skill. Has it
really become so normal to deny that some individuals are more
talented than others in their practised field? Should gold medals be
given to every athlete who runs in the Olympics, ignoring the fact
that some finished the course in a faster time than others?
In one sense, I think that what I am
saying is nothing new. Most of us have been aware of the amount that
being politically correct, which usually means being all-inclusive,
has started to infiltrate our culture. It just seems that this silly
attitude sneaked into the art culture quite a long time before we
were aware of it, and it now rests unchallenged in that area. The odd
and bizarre sculptures seen in art galleries that make no sense to
the common eye still seem odd and bizarre to us, yet at the same time
we have started to accept the idea that these can still be art.
Declaring that "my five year old
child could have done this" used to be a comment that meant "I
don't think that this piece really qualifies as art," but the
meaning seems to be changing towards "It may be art, but I'm not
very impressed by it," or perhaps even "my child could be
an artistic genius!"
Was there a time when you could go into
an art gallery and not, at any time, feel confused about what you
were looking at?
Image source: http://www.last.fm/user/abro83/journal
