Not What Art is?, but Why it is? Prt1
It’s really hard to suggest a formal meaning to what Art is. In this, 3 parts, very overly simplified, Street study as I like to call it, we’ll discuss it together. hoping to find a meaningful way of searching for a term that explains art as a concept, idea, and emotional expression.
In our modern days, art can’t be a form anymore, it’s more and more becoming a mentality that you possess. Nowadays you can suggest that someone is an artist based only on their opinions, and sometimes, only on their imagination. But we can agree on three main rules that give art its physical interpretation.
The three rules of Art:
1. Art must be sensed.
Yes, in fact, it makes no sense for art not to be. it can be read, heard, seen, or even smelled. Either way, the process of human interpretation in the brain comes from our senses, and for humans to interact with a subject they need to sense it first! It sounds very obvious yes. But it is important to know because the sense that we use in the interpretation process will certainly have the biggest effect on deciding to which medium this kind of art belongs. You can describe art as a signal, it has a form, we can use mathematics to interpret it, and physics to adjust it to match our preferred interpretation medium.
2. Art is not exactly the signal, it’s the whole structure of the signal, which contains the sender and the receiver.
Just like language, art isn’t just the final signal it’s the process of introducing the subject to an audience, so in a way, art must have a creator that decides the form, structure, subject, idea, vision, and meaning. and an audience who then reconstruct the art, making new meaning, and a new form. The audience is as important as the artist, even if it was just the artists themselves. an audience puts the art in context, it translates the signal in a way that turns Data into information. this process is huge for storing the art. Simply because a piece of information isn’t a piece of information unless it’s interpreted, and stored. it needs to be beneficial, And by beneficial I mean it needs to be understood by a sensor and can be used in other aspects of life. And for our final rule, It must generate feedback.
3. Art must generate feedback.
Now it’s counterintuitive to say an audience exists without actually getting feedback from the audience. But feedback is NOT an opinion and this is crucial. If we are to explain feedback using the idea of Sets. We can say the Feedback which is Set F, contains opinion which is Set O but is bigger. feedback is a reversed signal going from the receiver to the sender. feedback can also be a lost signal which means that every action, in this case, the signal, must generate a reaction which is also a signal. the reaction needs also to be sensed, either by the sender or simply just redirected to the audience itself. Feedback holds So much power. in a very simple way, it generates further information about the signal. It is needed to decide whether to store the signal or get rid of it. So to not complicate things, Feedback is knowing what to do with the art.
So is art a kind of Language?
In fact, art is not another kind of language. You can say in a way that art is an ancestor to what language is nowadays. A language is a form of informative communication, which means that a sender will send a signal to a receiver then the receiver will then generate a feedback signal to the sender. and that is basically what art is. But you may ask why is it that broad of a term? why it must only consist of these rules? Well, simply the answer is that. this is the only way to contain all art, that has ever been done by humanity. And until now I haven’t used the term “Expression”, to define art. simply because it’s not just an expression. Art is not all about feeling, although deeply related to them. If we are to talk about art before the Post-Modernistic approach, we could say that art is a physical interpretation of thoughts. but the Neo-Post-modern school has some other thoughts about that. Art now stopped being a physical manifestation of what's on our minds, and slowly turned out to be a “State of the mind”. We may call this type of behavior “Artistic Conformalism”, which refers to the changes made on the artistic features of a subject in the mind of the viewer, making the viewer an artist in their own mind.
How did all of this become so much complicated?
It has never been easy to understand, any type of human activity, let alone study it. One of the greatest examples of this kind of “Humanitization of nature” lies in Human sexual behaviors. how “Sex” also changed. evolved to match the Narcissistic characters of us humans. Art holds value, and value brings interests, so it’s less than normal for art to evolve as a beneficial tool for humans. As a philosophical idea, Art is art, it can’t be described using any other word. However, Art in the modern world is also, Money, Power, Fame, and Social Status. It holds so much power and gives so many signals to the audience around it. Now, why is that? Why does such an irrelevant purely conceptual idea holds that kind of power! We even use a new term describing artists, in Psychology, an artist is “Creative”, why is that? Why is art even different from language?. Well. First of all, we need to mention that, this is a heavily studied realm with endless theories. But we can deep-dive into some of those interesting ones. That may hold power to even explain human interaction.
The “Logo-therapy” approach.
Logotherapy is a psychological therapeutic approach derived from the Greek word “Logo” which means “Meaning”, and as the name suggests its main focus is on finding meaning. We can talk about Logo-therapy for hours and hours, and if you want to get into the “Real” self-improvement, 2.0 me, kind of stuff which I’m not totally with, you should start with a very well written, heavily studied, book from the father of Logo-therapy, “Man’s search for meaning” by Dr. Viktor Frankl. Back to Art, this approach is one of the most famous approaches in defining why art exists the way it does. Simply, art holds a code, and back to information theory, a code contains information. and the receiver's job is to unlock the code to capture the information in it. This approach is very helpful taking into account that art is used that way commercially. We can see that with a beautiful huge Graphic design specialization which is. You guessed it “Logo Design”. Logo design is literally used by every single Governmental, and Non-governmental, group of people. It’s a form of art that was used since the beginning of art itself. Lingual letters are Logos for sounds, numbers are logos for quantities. It is very obvious yes. Howevery it’s important to notice because usually, the obvious stuff is the stuff that messes with our heads. The idea here is that Art is used as a way of “Expression” and here we can see why expressionism exists. Art, they claim, is an Expression of something, that cannot be communicated through a common language. So for an artist that is sad, they’ll make “Sad Art” which is made for the audience to have a “Sad feeling” that they can communicate through the feedback. Art can also give meaning to the meaningless stuff, can convey ideas, thoughts, political approaches, erotic thoughts, etc. You can see that this type of approach is the most famous one, Art is a way of communicating meaning, that underlies its physical appearance. So it’s a code that every receiver gets in a different way.
The “Freudian” Approach.
The “Libido” approach or simply the “Sexual energy” approach.
Here we are, The father of psychology. If we want to translate his idea in a straightforward way. Art is the expression of an “Emotional Baggage” or in a simpler term A “Sexual suppression”. Freud believes that art is indeed beneficial, not just that, Freud claims that art is one of the biggest pieces of evidence of his theory of psychology. Art for Freud is controlled mostly “subconsciously”, so in a sense, neither the artists nor the audience fully understands the art. The artists make art based on their emotional memory, after that, the piece is carried to the audience who then also interpret the piece based on their own emotional memory. This approach, although served the world of psychology and philosophy so very much, is dangerous, Why is that? Well, let’s divide it into a fraction and study it closely.
Painter “A” draws the drawing “D”.
An audience “P” containing three individuals, sees the drawing for the first time. we’ll call this process of transformation “T”.
The audience P={l1, l2, l3}; l1: first person, l2: second person, l3: third person.
A doesn’t know what kind of information the drawing holds, because they’re working subconsciously.
D itself is a signal that needs interpretation.
P cannot interpret D as a whole, each individual interprets the signal in their own “ subconscious” way.
So we have this interpretation l1 != l2 != l3.
This created confusion, although it’s a very poetic idea that each individual holds a different kind of explanation on the art piece. however, we’re facing a classical case of “Nietzsche’s theory of truth”. Truth disappeared completely. And the essence of the drawing got lost in the translation. This theory still obeys the three rules of Art. Because D is still a signal. P is a creator, A exists and has an opinion about the art, and l1, l2, and l3 exist and have opinions about the piece so there’s also feedback.
But truth got lost here, and what does that mean? why is this a bad thing? well simply the idea here is “unfalsifiable” thus cannot be tested.
The whole Freudian school is unfalsifiable and this is one of the great weaknesses of Freud’s idea of psychology, although his ideas, shaped modern psychology in a way that no one has ever done, re-established the modern clinical psychology realm, and constructed an effective way of studying humans, still, science is science. A theory like this will always stay as a “Theory” no matter how much truth it contains.
Freud again! but this time as an art school.
Now after totally destroying Freud, we must say. No one can destroy Freud. His ideas shaped modern social studies so much that they helped, giving birth to an art form that changed the perspective of humans towards themselves. Yup, that is “Surrealism” baby!!!
Some historians claim that it started in the 1920s while others say it was discovered way before that. Surrealism basically said, “Hey do you remember that weird thing Freud called “The subconscious”, well, we freaking LOVE ITT!!!”. And so started the great revolution of Surrealism, which broke the boundaries of Art, destroyed the idea of rules, and reshaped modern art in a way, that nowadays, we cannot express ourselves without a bit of surrealism. Like every school of thought, surrealism took a bit of an extreme approach towards art. Surrealism started as a revolution against art itself. Which sounds odd, but yeah! Surrealism was originally derived from an even harsher school of thought, and it is Dadaism. It allegedly started 4 to 9 years before surrealism, Dada was even embraced by surrealist artists, Like for instance, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, and even the cinematic work of Luis Bunuel held a bit of Dada in the shade. Dadaism’s main idea is to break the social structure and mainly said that “What is there, cannot be fixed, it must be shattered first”. Dadaism saw beauty in the destruction of art and claimed it’s a new kind of art. However, there’s a big problem with Dada, and even a bigger one with Surrealism which called for “repairing instead of reshaping”. They both lacked the structure of meaning. People, as Logotherapy proved in so many ways, absolutely love meaning. in fact, modern psychology describes the lack of meaning as a form of a problem. When the “Receivers” first saw surreal art they thought about the endless possibilities that this type of art can produce, how much freedom it holds. But surrealism took a harsh approach towards society. It introduced the idea of “Meta-Poetry”. Now, what is Meta-Poetry? Well, it’s simply an explosion of thoughts and emotions, while using an art medium to clean the remains up. Meta-Poetry wasn’t understood by people. In fact, it was hated by most, a lot of that had to do with the idea of “Lack of Meaning”, or in a bigger term “Anti-Meaning”, so instead of artists focusing on The subconsciousness, they went far to destroy any attempt of meaning, the meaning was simply not allowed in Surrealism.
Let’s talk about how can artists bring their subconsciousness into art. Well whoever claims to do so, is simply a liar. why is that? Because this is a scientific term that is used to describe a region in the mind beyond observation. talking about the subconsciousness this way is like talking about what’s on the other side of the edge of the universe. It is irrelevant, we cannot reach this region in the mind till now. So saying that you control it, or derive your ideas from it, is like saying that you can control your
pancreas in a way that gives you more energy. Till now it’s not true and “Unfalsifiable”.
We have not even come close to discussing the structure of art, let alone explaining why art exists. The scientific approach towards learning art is getting us a little closer to understanding it, but with every step closer a new door opens and an endless amount of possibilities explode in front of us. I will try to suggest what we know, and how can it help us in the next articles. Maybe by linking psychology, philosophy, and Physics with Language as a social structure, we can get a sense of how big, broad, and unimaginably misunderstood art is.
Notes and References
Some books that I used in research so you can also enjoy this subject from its masters:
- On Certainty by Ludwig Wittgenstein published in 1969
- Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud published in 1913
- How Pleasure Works by Paul Bloom published in 2010
- Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche published in 1908
- Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Theodor W. Adorno published in 1951
- The Theory of Communicative Action by Jürgen Habermas published in 1981
- The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker published in 1994
Note: For any random person who stumbles across my writings, I am writing in a street language, although the information above is backed with heavy research, I encourage you to research your own way on this topic. I will be following up with a more detailed search. But I will always be oversimplifying one of the greatest ideas of philosophy. So please respect the work and don’t take my opinions for granted. do your research and gain the knowledge yourself. I’m here just to give you a road that you can follow!
Art Reference:
- Art pieces 1, 2, 3,4, 6 Are created by me.
- Art piece 5 is created by Salvador Dali.
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Email: fareskhadouj1@gmail.com
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