My friend Lewis just got a job at a law firm. He’s an
artist. Fed up with low pay, but most importantly, it seems, with the role of
art in our lives. In a discussion we had the other night, in sum his
perspective is that art – what is considered high art – is nothing more than
creating surprise – an odd combination of visual and intellectual masturbation.
Lewis is an artist. A good one. A really good one. But he
wanted his art to generate more than a discussion among dilettantes. He got
into it for the same reasons that many artists seek the profession – for the
chance to change people’s minds – to perceive a wrong in the world and to
address it.
But he finds art unhinged from the ability to change the
world. Why not choose music or political activism instead? These are much more
direct routes to social change. To create art, you need to abstract and
obscure. To say what you mean is not to join the ranks of the world’s top
artists. To speak in this pantheon, your work must hearken the erstwhile
masters, move beyond them, and make an iconoclastic statement. This effort necessarily
leaves the common folk behind and removes art from the realm of social change.
To these comments, I vociferously disagreed. Look to
pointillism and impressionism. These movements changed the way that we
understand the world. They altered the very connections between our eyes and brains
– transforming our powers of perception. And what of Guernica? A painting that
protested Franco from beneath his nose. Lewis protested that a) these were art
events of years past, and b) these don’t compare to mass social movements. That
art does not have the power of other means of changing minds.
And while I’m still not 100% on board with this
understanding of art, the conversation did raise some interesting ideas that
percolated to consciousness during my run today. What if high art is Wikipedia?
Not the individual pages, but the conceptualization and realization of the idea
itself?
By one definition, art is simply the product of human
creativity. Anything can fulfill that definition, from pet rock to Muncheechee.
That definition is shite. In fact, as I look through various definitions of
art, each one is shite, such as this from dictionary.yahoo.com: “The conscious
production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other
elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the
production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.”
It very much depends on your definition of art – but I’m
coming at it from a motivational standpoint. The artist wants to change how you
perceive the world. Artists make art to influence minds. And so here is
Wikipedia – changing the way that we perceive and create knowledge – making it
a product of the many, rather than that of the experts – shifting our
perspective. Is this effort not that of an artist? Is Wikipedia art?
So if you’re an artist, can you become more efficient at
your chosen task by looking to Jimmy Wales rather than Picasso?
Let’s say you want to comment on and affect the fiber of our
society. Will you paint or create an online application that shifts the balance
of intellectual power? Maybe our definition of art is too locked in the past. And the word is
problematic because it implies or relates to “beauty” as the quoted definition
above indicates. When, we all know that art has nothing to do with beauty –
Thomas Kinkade has to do with beautiful scenes of cobblestone brooks – and is
this art? I think it’s décor. And yet, like Kinkade, even our modern day
Picassos are relegated to décor. This role is not where art intends to be.
No, we need to redefine this term – to modernize it – to restore
its intent – to rescue it from the Art Basels of the world and to understand it in the context of transformational ideas - the products of which are currently trapped in the language of business.
