For what purpose, art?
Apr. 27th, 2006 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexYesterday, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tisana posted something that caused myself and deadwinter to exchange briefly about the purpose of art. I figured it was probably crass to continue hijacking her LJ comment thread so I'm moving it to here. Also, I have a number of artist friends whose opinions I'd value hearing.
For this I'm going to define "art" quite broadly, as all sorts of creative forms. Written and spoken word, visual arts, you name it, everyone gets to play.
Thesis: Art should not be deliberately obscure in its purpose of meaning or message.
dw states it somewhat more gently but I think that's a sentence he'd agree with. On the surface I'm initially tempted to agree with him. Art is in many respects a communicative act; if it fails to communicate it seems reasonable to say the art has failed.
But the minute I start to dig on this it turns into a slippery slope, thus: _who_ is being communicated with/to? What are the criteria by which we'd judge deliberate obscurity? If I make a picture that no one but me gets is that a failure in my picture or in the viewing audience? What if I'd shown it to a different audience? What if just one person out there gets my message/meaning*? Is that a failure? What if I only intended to communicate with that person? Is there a tipping point somewhere on the "no one gets it" to "everyone gets it" spectrum where I get to relax and say, 'Yep, did it; I communicated with my audience.'
(*Classically this is what cryptography is about - ensuring that only intended recipient(s) can read messages. One might argue that cryptography is art, or is the antithesis of art. I think I could argue either side. Or both.)
This derived from a thread about art that was posited as superior, in the sense of "ha, I get it and you don't" more or less as a kind of "in joke". But it also touches on the fundamental conflict between so-called "high" art and so-called "pop" or mass culture art. Is one form better than the other? From the point of view of snob status the ballet might be better despite its much more impenetrable messages than, say, a music video with great broad audience appeal. Conversely, the fact that ballet (or opera) is inaccessible might be deemed a mark of its failure.
This also assumes that obscurity of message is something that can be controlled by the artist. People can try to make something accessible and end up missing the mark completely; or, they might labor in obscurity for years only to suddenly be "discovered" and have their message heard and understood by a huge new audience. Conversely, if an artist deliberately makes something she thinks only a few people will "get" is she necessarily doing something wrong/bad/less than trying to make the message clearer and more explicit? Isn't there something to be said for the reward of an effort made to understand the message? Isn't that somehow better than having the message "handed" to you?
Oh, did you think I was going to have answers? Nah, just questions.
tisana posted something that caused myself and deadwinter to exchange briefly about the purpose of art. I figured it was probably crass to continue hijacking her LJ comment thread so I'm moving it to here. Also, I have a number of artist friends whose opinions I'd value hearing.For this I'm going to define "art" quite broadly, as all sorts of creative forms. Written and spoken word, visual arts, you name it, everyone gets to play.
Thesis: Art should not be deliberately obscure in its purpose of meaning or message.
dw states it somewhat more gently but I think that's a sentence he'd agree with. On the surface I'm initially tempted to agree with him. Art is in many respects a communicative act; if it fails to communicate it seems reasonable to say the art has failed.
But the minute I start to dig on this it turns into a slippery slope, thus: _who_ is being communicated with/to? What are the criteria by which we'd judge deliberate obscurity? If I make a picture that no one but me gets is that a failure in my picture or in the viewing audience? What if I'd shown it to a different audience? What if just one person out there gets my message/meaning*? Is that a failure? What if I only intended to communicate with that person? Is there a tipping point somewhere on the "no one gets it" to "everyone gets it" spectrum where I get to relax and say, 'Yep, did it; I communicated with my audience.'
(*Classically this is what cryptography is about - ensuring that only intended recipient(s) can read messages. One might argue that cryptography is art, or is the antithesis of art. I think I could argue either side. Or both.)
This derived from a thread about art that was posited as superior, in the sense of "ha, I get it and you don't" more or less as a kind of "in joke". But it also touches on the fundamental conflict between so-called "high" art and so-called "pop" or mass culture art. Is one form better than the other? From the point of view of snob status the ballet might be better despite its much more impenetrable messages than, say, a music video with great broad audience appeal. Conversely, the fact that ballet (or opera) is inaccessible might be deemed a mark of its failure.
This also assumes that obscurity of message is something that can be controlled by the artist. People can try to make something accessible and end up missing the mark completely; or, they might labor in obscurity for years only to suddenly be "discovered" and have their message heard and understood by a huge new audience. Conversely, if an artist deliberately makes something she thinks only a few people will "get" is she necessarily doing something wrong/bad/less than trying to make the message clearer and more explicit? Isn't there something to be said for the reward of an effort made to understand the message? Isn't that somehow better than having the message "handed" to you?
Oh, did you think I was going to have answers? Nah, just questions.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-27 04:16 pm (UTC)Mostly I think that thinking of art as a form of communication is, while true, distracting. It evokes precisely the kind of information-theory reading-frame that you're in here, and that goes off to one side of what makes art worthwhile for me.
By way of analogy -- a punch to the jaw is certainly a form of communication, but its primary purpose is as an instrument of state change. (And, yes, _all_ communication is intended as an instrument of state change. But as above, concentrating on the punch to the jaw as a communication is primarily, to my mind, a distraction.)
An injection of adrenalin can, I guess, be considered a form of communication... though here we get even more tenuous. A flu vaccine, more tenuous still.
The point of all this is that, IMHO, the proper measure of art is the effect it has on its audience. _Not_ whether they properly decode the art or not, _not_ whether the audience recapitulates some state that is recognizably what the artist had in mind at the time, not even whether the artist _was_ in any state of mind (eg, I'm content to judge sunsets by the same artistic/aesthetic criteria as paintings, even without hypothesizing some intentional sunset-creator). Just, what effect it has.
If the effect it has is to leave them staring at it for a long time feeling like there's some kind of message there they aren't _quite_ getting... I can see where that might be valuable, or not.
If it's to leave them standing there feeling stupid because they aren't educated enough to get it... I don't see much point to that, personally.
Etc. etc. etc.
In this sense, I find the drug metaphor more useful than than the message metaphor for art.