"We are rapidly approaching the point where everything is art and, therefore, nothing is art." ~ Margo Buccini
So today I was thinking (dangerous thing) and I realized that I've barely talked about art in what was intended to be an art blog. Then again, I've expressed my feelings and thoughts quite a bit here, and many people seem to believe that self-expression alone is enough to qualify as art, so perhaps I've not only talked about art, but created it as well. Ok, see, that's the kind of stuff that gives me a headache about art. I was sitting here thinking, "What should I talk about today?" I have plenty of ideas, sure. Working with polymer clay, pricing artwork, where I find inspiration, a cool tigerseye necklace I made yesterday... But just now, I've decided to talk about something that I rant about frequently to my friends and family, and that subject is the attitude of the art world.
Now, keep in mind that I am by no means an art expert. But I'm pretty sure that no one in the world qualifies to be an art expert. Sure, you can be an expert at identifying which pieces come from which artist. You can be an expert in art history or art supplies or painting techniques. But "art" is a term that, I've come to believe, cannot be defined. Maybe someone will change my mind on that someday, but truly, how do you define art? Centuries ago it may have been a simple term, but the world of modern art has flipped everything upside down and left people scrambling to comprehend just what art is supposed to be.
Let me take a moment to explain my background. I've wanted to be an artist since I learned how to pick up a pencil. I considered other career paths along the way, but I always came back to art. When I was just starting middle school, I took a private class in impressionism, where I learned that I was quite skilled at drawing in the daily sketchbook my teacher made me keep, but absolutely horrible at painting, which was the main focus of the class. In middle school and high school I excelled at drawing and it consumed much of my time. I started out with an anime and cartoonish style, then I gradually progressed to a blending of cartoon and realistic features. At this point in my life I was drawing nearly every day, but then I graduated and moved on to college. This marked a huge shift in my style, as I studied under the incredibly talented Marlin Adams. I had admired his work and even watched him give a portrait lesson twice in my high school career, but having him as a professor changed everything. With his guidance, I discovered that I had the incredible ability to create highly realistic, detailed portraits using nothing but simple graphite. Marlin taught me how to create beauty, and I became his star pupil because of my ability to render values unlike anyone else he was teaching at the time. I was by no means the most talented artist in the school, but I was the best at what I did. I almost immediately abandoned my previous cartoonish work, since none of it could even compare to the beauty of what I was suddenly able to achieve. But my newfound niche came with a lot of baggage. Not only did a drawing now take several hours to complete, but I struggled anytime that I had to draw anything that didn't have a two-dimensional reference for me to look at and grid out. Unfortunately, it's very hard to express all the ideas in my head in this format. Before, I had been able to just put something down on paper whenever I wanted. I can't do that anymore. When I moved on to my next college, they tried desperately to reverse all that I had learned. The art department at Berry College was a complete shift from the art department at Gordon College. While the two schools were equally skilled at imparting knowledge and teaching techniques, the way art was treated was completely and totally different.
Now, I told you all of that so I can explain to you the heart of the argument that I've had with both myself and many others when it comes to art. At Gordon College, making art was about technique, skill, and beauty. Essentially, art was something that took a lot of time and made people ooh and ahh in awe at how beautiful it was. At Berry College, making art was about self-expression, answering questions, and pushing boundaries. In other words, art was something that forced its way out of you and made people tilt their heads and go "huh?" At Gordon I learned from Michelangelo. At Berry I learned from Rothko. Now, try to imagine, if you can, being praised for your obsession with detail, accuracy, and technique, then being thrown into a world where people want you to throw away all of that detail and accuracy and make something completely insane and new. It was maddening, frustrating, depressing, so on and so forth. I hated it. My Berry professors would ask me things like "It's a nice picture but... where are you in it?" or "Why did you do have to do it this way? Why not do it another way instead?" or "What questions did you resolve for yourself in this piece?" More than once, I was tempted to duct tape my professor's mouth shut and just shout, "This is the way I like to do it! It's pretty and it took me forever so you should just shut up and like it!"
If at this point, you're waiting to hear some profound revelation of how I merged the two different methods and found some sort of peace in this little War of the Arts, I have to disappoint you. I didn't reconcile the two sides, I just picked one. I don't care about self-expression or breaking down walls, I just want to make beautiful things that people enjoy. And I do. Many people say this means that I'm not a real artist. That I'm a fraud and a sham. Others say that my art is the only kind of art that should be taken seriously. I disagree with both of those statements. Art can be many different things made in many different ways, and no one has to like all of it. I hate modern art. I hate Dada and Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. I can't stand to look at the works, and I don't relate to anything in them. However, I still believe that they have value. They're still art and they still inspire thousands of people. They're just not for me. At all. Other people I know think that Neo-Classicism, Renaissance, and Baroque artists were nothing but copying machines who made pretty things that had no life to them, but those men and women are my heroes. What makes one art form or one way of thinking more legitimate than any other? If everyone shared the exact same opinion, art simply wouldn't exist at all. This doesn't mean that I condone this War of the Arts or think that it's good for the art community. Artists need to stop fighting over it and demeaning each other. Nothing makes one artist more legitimate than another. Art is what you want it to be, and it's also what other people want it to be. It's a contradiction. It's chaos and order, beauty and ugliness, subjective and objective, realistic and fantastical. It's everything and nothing. Just accept it and move on. Or at least don't tell me I'm not an artist. I don't really like that.
Ok. I've ranted about art long enough. Back to actually making some. Maybe next time I'll talk about something more concrete and useful. Who knows?
