IS ART USELESS?

A couple of pages ago, I wrote that art is useless. I have received two wonderful responses, one sent by Philippe Desfonds, and another by Michael Berry, both longtime readers. These passages are sage meditations on the use of art.

“as an artist, you question through another tool than science, the intellectual reflection, the descriptive analysis of the mechanisms of our society and the human being…as much as possible because it is not a question remaking Leonardo da Vinci…and indeed you question the society on current problems, and if you are good, you feel these movements and this subject of society or human being before science or newspapers take it…and the artist uses widely the emotion, which leads to challenge the human being and to make him think from a different angle…” Dr. Christophe Daclin

“The word art has meant “order” to me for many years, it means a skill, a capacity to think things through, to play within a universal visual language, to innovate visually, to transcend dominating conditioned visual and verbal images…to me by embracing what is art, and what is not, that technical distinction is what frees one from psychological subjective constraints.” Michael Berry

If we combine key words from both meditations, one list might be emotion, imitation, transcend, capacity. So a sentence might be: Art is a capacity for emotion which transcends imitation.

If we use a different key word assembly such as reflection, analysis, order, conditioned, then we might get the sentence: Art is an analysis of order which provides a reflection beyond the conditioned.

What is really great is that both the Daclin and the Berry passages structure art as an active engagement. Technique is not mentioned. Thinking to the point of mechanistic resolution is central to both. Thinking, questioning and innovation are central. And with these active constructs, then I agree, this is what art should be.

Two key words that nearly any disposition of art omits are time and knowledge. Drawing with time allows for a transcendent knowledge of the mechanism which frees us from psychological and emotional constraints. Drawing with time provides the capacity for knowledge of holistic form.

With this awakened mindset, then Duchamp’s Large Glass is art. And Brugel’s The Harvest is not. Keep in mind that we have been arguing about what art is at least since Plato: I don’t pretend that we have made any discovery that approaches resolution.

So how about this: What is not art is art.