Art: Once Removed
Art: Twice Removed
And following the fall of Post-Modernism, some have theorized that this will be the Death of Art. This is, of course, assuming that art isn't already dead. Maybe Art has been dead all these years and is waiting to come back to life.
There will be a point when the very concept of Art has been so battered and beaten that it will die. A concept can only take so much. Fine Art of our age has already fallen from popular opinion. The common man doesn't care about what's happening in the art industry.
Apart from video-games, movies, advertising, and other things that a lot of people don't really consider 'Art'. The Art that finds its way into a museum is now the type that is only understood by the pretentiously sophisticated of our generation. Beyond that little world, the rest of planet turns their eyes to art and shrugs.
Question: Is that because they don't understand it, or because they're already on the side of enlightenment that Art's evolution will eventually place it?
The Death of Art will be an interesting experience. It means that the life of the artist will be put aside and people will simply accept art as the Chinese and Japanese saw it centuries ago.
Part of life.
The art behind a weapon is the aesthetics, how well it kills, the designs down the side and the family inscription on the blade. There exists inside the Japanese katana an art of design, beauty, skill, and malice in the same creation.
But when it comes right down to it, it's a weapon. It does what it does.
It kills.
Personalization identifies the owner with the weapon rather than provoke a viewer. The death of art will really be the death of Museums rather than the death of artistic concept. Art will come full circle by the end of Post-Modernism and return to its place thousands of years ago.
We made the mistake of separating Art from other studies. Art exists in biology, aesthetics, astronomy, literature, war, philosophy, and millions of other subsections into which humans have divided the study of life and the universe. Art by itself doesn't exist.
It's both, and we shouldn't distinguish the two.
Art is not it's own subject, it encompasses everything.
The Death of Art will be something to celebrate because finally we can stop asking all the questions and searching for true originality. Because, honestly, originality doesn't exist. No matter what we do, we will use materials that have already existed, and put them on canvases that were already there. Using art to find yourself can be useful, but it can't be used to find originality.
Post-Modernism struggles to delay the Death of Art as long as possible, until every artist searches every crevice of expression in the search for true originality until finally it's admitted that originality is impossible.
After the Death of Art, art will be art for the sake of being art. But it will allow room for the entire system to start over from the beginning. But if it does, there will be a certain amount of enlightenment in the next cycle of artistic movements that this cycle couldn't understand.
Next time, we'll know that the search for originality and trying to define art as it's own subject became Art's causes of death.
And it will become not Art, but art.
Art: Completely Removed.
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2 comments:
Art, according to Oxford:
"the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power"
...and even though that definition forces me to include utter dreck like the works of Jackson Pollock, the important point is that art is in no way required to be original. Many of the old masters even stressed the benefits of imitating that which came before - to my knowledge, this drive for pure originality is only a couple of hundred years old (pretty young in the grand scheme of things).
Your argument is, in my opinion, flawed in that it assumes the entire point of art is to achieve originality. Despite what some people may tell you, it isn't. It's point is to look good and for others to appreciate it. That's not to say that trying to be original in some way is a bad thing, just that the pursuit of total originality has blinded many to the true purpose of art. Though it may be a subjective standard, art stops being art when you have to "get art" to appreciate it in any way.
Art is not going to die as long as there are still people around to paint pictures and other people to look at them and go, "Ooo, pretty!"
Of course, originality might not be something that no one else has done before. It could be something that no one else has done quite in the same way. If you wanted to get downright nit-picky, originality not only exists, it is present in everything. Even in mass-produced clothing at Wal-Mart, there's bound to be one stitch that's different, one rhinestone that's a nanometer off, one millionth of a difference in the hue of this red hat and that red hat.
Of course, that could all be crap. But maybe originality is overrated, or a misnomer for authenticity.
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