Your Thoughts On Art

[Alan V]

For example, I would say that the kind of art I respect opens up the world for people -- it adds to the richness and variety of life. While the kind of art I don't want to encourage -- which I will call "bad" in conversation -- does the opposite. It reinforces clichés and received ideas. In a way, it makes us stupider, by repeating to us what we think we know and shutting out alternatives.

I agree with and support much of what you wrote. I have to comment on the above, however.

It would seem, by what you said, that you dislike much of historical Christian art because it "reinforces clichés and received ideas. In a way, it makes us stupider, by repeating to us what we think we know and shutting out alternatives." This is similar to my point about propaganda.

Also, I can understand art reinforcing received ideas which are worthwhile, like the love of the natural world or even the love of diversity. So I do not think art must necessarily be progressive. It can function as art quite well if it is conservative. It all depends on the quality of its ideas.

One of the reasons I love big art museums like the Philadelphia Museum of Art is that they are like time machines. You can walk from one room to another and be immersed in different historical periods, with different art and furnishings. The propaganda from different periods with different religious myths tend to cancel each other out, and what is left are aesthetics and emotion. The overall message then becomes the support for diversity even if the original intention behind the artworks was in many cases religious propaganda. When art is contextualized differently, the messages are different.

So since art appeals mainly aesthetically and emotionally, its difficult for me to consider such ideas as the intellectual content of the art itself. More often, art illustrates intellectual content from elsewhere, which is why so many artists talk so much about what their art is supposed to be. You can't really put all that detail into the art itself because of the limitations of the media used. This is why I also say that some artists, who try to expand on those limitations by "stretching the boundaries of art," might be happier as writers or performers.

Adorno says that sitting by a window doing nothing is a political act, because it is removed from the web of buying and selling which runs our own culture. And I think Thoreau says something similar. Likewise, just the choice to spend your time making a work of art is a choice that has all kinds of meaning, conscious or not. If I choose to devote large parts of my life to personal, beautiful, intricate, time-consuming, painstaking, not especially attention-getting, objects, then I am working in direct opposition to many values in the modern world. The return on investment, quantitatively, is less than working at a cash register. Is that an intellectual idea? I think it kind of is. 

I don't think there is any reason to call such actions "art," since that tends to muddy the waters. Call it philosophy perhaps. Creating art is arguably a better use of time than religious devotion or getting drunk in bars, for instance, but that still depends on the art.

What kind of art do you find worthwhile to create?