What is Art?
Recently, I am reading Camille Paglia’s ‘Sexual
Personae’ and I come across this; “Freud has no rivals among his
successors because they think he wrote science, when in fact he wrote art.” It
feels good seeing someone write what I’d always felt.
The distance between science and art never was a deep
divide. The myth lingers that the founders of modern chemistry, the Alchemists,
had a get rich quick scheme to turn lead into gold. The Christians, notorious
for stifling progression with fear of change, naturally, fabricated this. What
the Alchemists sought was a metaphorical gold of the spirit; their use of
proto-pagan symbols verifies this.
But I don’t intend to be Christian-bashing here – whose
architects have been masters of the fusion of art and spirit in the western
world for the better part of two millennium. I feel with in the question ‘What
Is Art’ there is a strong need to define what is real as opposed to what is
imagined; therein lies the true freedom of the individual.
To define the division between science and art is to define
the connection as well, for one cannot exist without the other. At the most
basic, the art of language; science would be lost without it. And the science
of transmission – television for example, so much art would not have been
created, or perhaps simply altered to suit another medium. Is it a fine line in
the mind that separates the real from the imagined, or is art the struggle to
define what is real in metaphorical terms?
The thing is, we all live vicariously through the arts. When
we have actual, visceral experience, part of our innate social pact is to share
that experience, so that others may have our experience vicariously. Not
everyone takes up the challenge, though. The few who do the art of their
experience get called ‘artists’.
One of the greatest problems with religious art is that it
merely repeats a vicarious experience of another, and so on. Their audience
feels a need to even further detach itself from the original artist, making the
work more mythological and fictitious. Which brings us to the question of how
valid as experience IS the original? Since all art is metaphor, the paradox is
that even so-called representational art, let’s say, an artist invites patrons
into a forest and says; ‘this tree is my artwork, and I call this piece ‘Tree’.
The moment it is perceived as art, it is no longer itself but is instead a
representation of itself.
Is art a piffling night’s entertainment for the jaded as
much as it is a salve for the helpless, the wretched and the damned? At what
point does the art of yoga become the science of health?
Art has no inherent morality. Personally, I’d like to think
of myself as one who seeks the type of art that would challenge, or at least
test, whatever preconceptions I’ve picked up. However, all my initial reactions
tend to be pedantic, as predictable as a caged animal. It often takes me years
of separation from the stimuli of the original art to realize how much I’ve
assumed. The mind protects itself, often using faulty logic and imagining
trauma where there is none. Bad art will support, enable our assumptions, biases
and paranoias. Good art will challenge us and question all potential illusions.
