The Art of Art
You know it when you see it
If you look at something being presented as a “work of art,” and you feel annoyed, disgusted, repulsed, or angry, it is not art.
Now that we have defined what art is NOT, how do we determine what it is?
Hard to put this answer in a short descriptive sentence, but we certainly know what art is. Art is the pursuit of perfection through the use of harmony, balance and rhythm.
It gets a lot more complicated, but for a dictionary-style definition, it will do. Art is and always has been an attempt to capture ineffable eternal qualities in a creative work that elevates, pleases and elucidates beauty. Beauty is neither masculine nor feminine, it is the quality of possessing harmony, balance and rhythm.
Far too often these days, we are confronted with provocation and told it is art. Provocation is not art. It is making something out of balance in order to elicit a reaction, typically not a pleasant one. Emotions, particularly strong ones, are a reaction to something in the environment being out of balance, whether it’s an excess of pleasure or pain.
The proper reaction to art is catharsis - the release of emotions. The happy ending trope is in fact the resolution of imbalance and a return to harmony. The audience sighs with relief and leaves feeling like the Universe always rights itself.
Provocation is the exact opposite. The ending leaves the characters in worse shape than when they began and the audience is depressed, confused and full of angst. The emotional tension was not resolved and the Universe seems deeply indifferent if not outrights hostile, without purpose or reason.
Even in the great tragedies, like “Romeo & Juliet,” “Oedipus,” or “Macbeth,” there is a sense that justice has been served or destiny ordained the outcome in order to maintain balance, be it defiance of family, murder or revenge.
Creativity springs from limitations. Making flesh look like flesh presents no limits, but making stone appear soft and life-like is a challenge of skill and talent. Making oil on fabric look vibrant and full of light when there is none is a challenge of skill and talent. Making words take on life and breath in a fictional environment is a challenge of skill and talent.
Artificial intelligence cannot create art because it has no limits. Its time scale is highly compressed and excelerated. It has no limits on breath or heartbeats. It has no distractions, appetites or goals to fight. The machine doesn’t suffer or feel pressure. It has no budget or materials to work with and against. There is no inspiration or muse, just electrons and phosphors.
In 1958, a huckster named Yves Klein stuck a cabinet in an empty room and called it “The Void”. Thousands of duped gawkers paid to see nothing. He later sold nothing in exchange for gold, giving receipts to the buyers. One of those receipts last year sold for over a million dollars, transferring all rights to nothing to the new owner.
The “show” was provocative. It got attention. People paid money for it. But it wasn’t art in any sense of the word - well, perhaps an artful grift. The scammer had an infinite amount of nothing to work with, and he did nothing to modify it, to use its nature against itself, to draw harmony, balance and rhythm out of Nature. The audience left feeling as empty as the nothing they had viewed.
In 2019, an Italian grifter named Marizio Cattelan taped three bananas to a wall, created certificates of authenticity. He sold two of them for $120,000. Good grift, not art. It got people talking and drew media attention (hardly a chore these days) and duped someone into buying it, but the bananas do not defy their nature to elicit catharsis. There is no message to be extracted, other than many people are easily duped. It does not bring harmony, balance and rhythm to the hearts and minds of the viewer, just a feeling of “is that all there is?”.
It is not that grifts like this exist - emperors have been buying new clothes for centuries. Rather, it is that grifts like this are presented to the world as the height of beauty, grace and culture. This has been going on since the late 1800s, particularly since the invention of the camera.
But it’s not art.
Art has always been the pinnacle of culture. It is the aspiration of perfection within a society that drives it to create beautiful things that inspire generations to go higher and further.
Instead, we have witnessed and century of degradation, dissolution and devolution. I blame it on whoever has been promoting Darwin and Einstein. Humans have been reduced to hairless apes with pretentions of grandeur in a relative universe where beauty and morality are nothing more that transient frames of reference. We have nothing to strive for, because we are the peak of evolution. We have no need for morality, because we need only change our point of view and it’s all meaningless.
Art has been under attack for decades. If we are surrounded with beauty and harmony, how could we be persuaded that painted men are women? If our ideals are debased as monkey-mind tricks, what struggle is there for balance and rhythm?
Music has been reduced to toneless rantings of vulgarity over repetitive synth tracks. Paintings are nothing more than pigments hurled at a canvas. Sculpture is as easy as roping off an empty space. Films are endless hollow jingoism emoted in detached scenes empty of drama and resolution. What have we done to ourselves?
The creatures who built glorious temples, created mind-boggling realism out of stone, arranged pigments in scenes so realistic one expects the subjects to move - these creatures have been reduced to vomiting on canvas, dunking symbols in urine, and fingerpainting with feces.
The first time I went to Prague, I was profoundly struck by the dichotomy between its glorious Karlovy Most and the Astronomical Clock, and the dour and dreary cement blocks of Soviet-era buildings. Like ring around the collar, the city center, anchored by the amazing St. Jakuba Vetsilho cathedral, was hemmed in by the most uninspired and wretched utilitarian ant piles.
It brought home in a very real and tangible way the horrors of collectivist societies. There is no inspiration, the individual is a cog in a machine, infinitely replaceable and worthless. There is no creativity since harmony, balance and rhythm are wastes of raw materials that the State needs, unless of course it reinforces the endless Message.
And the people, who see nothing but ugly, feel nothing but ugly.
This is the future being shoved down our throats, and the reason why we must fight with every fiber of our beings. We are not ambulatory pond scum. We are not rubber stamped automatons. We instinctively seek beauty and harmony. We respond viscerally to Bach and Michelangelo and Shakespeare. We know perfection when we see it, and we want more.
It is vital that we not only preserve the great works of our ancestors, but strive in everything we do to improve on them - stand on their shoulders and reach higher.
What is being done to our culture is vile and repulsive. We must shun it like the odor of a rotting corpse. The scum that are doing this are trying to kill our souls and fill our senses with rot and foulness.
It may be too late for us here and now, but as many generations as have come and gone since the first human stood up, that is how many we must save from this horror.
Art is beauty. Art is harmony. Art is balance. Art is rhythm. If we create these things every day in everything we do, the sum of our efforts will reach far beyond what we can imagine. It will inspire and motivate countless generations, who will look at our society and gag in disgust, wondering how we survived in such filth.
Go forth and create!
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Youreminded me of Jacques Debierue, the Nihilistic Surrealist, Charles Willeford fictionalized as retiring incognito to the western outback of Boynton Beach in The Burnt Orange Heresy, first published in hardcover by Crown in 1971. I have the 1987 paperback edition by Black Lizard Books, with the blurb by Elmore Leonard on the cover. “No One writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford.” His most famous painting was an empty frame on a cracked brick wall in Paris-1920's. Seen by thousands. Possibly parodying the empty cabinet.