art

the human mind is filled with such curiosity and beauty, i reckon to be bored with life, you’d be mad.

when it comes to writing posts like these, i often feel that most things people write nowadays are inspired mainly by annoyance, grief, compassion and hate. emotions that evoke a necessity to outlet set emotions. that feeling you have something inspiring to share with the rest of the world. i feel i do this quite a lot. a few weeks ago, i posted something about getting over myself, and a lot of you perceived this as something influential and inspiring, and a lot of you perceived it as bullshit. but it’s quite amazing, semantically, how people take messages and what it means to them. i’m thinking quite a lot about art lately, and all types of art forms that we appreciate (and most certainly, don’t appreciate). an artist can shape and create something that’s beautiful to people, develop this sentimentality to someone they don’t even know, and as surreal as it may seems, there can be quite a beauty to that. you create something that’s quite abstract or direct, and people observe this creation and think different things. people can also think of it as bullshit. i remember having conversations with people about art and plenty of individuals have said something along the lines of: “i don’t think art [referring to paintings] is anything special. someone can splash paint on a canvas and call it art, sell it for millions of pounds, and they’re laughing.” and that point is certainly true. art can be very much incidental and artists can get away with quite a lot. but we have to ask the question as to whether art is special as the artist’s intention, or what the person makes it out to be. does it matter that the artist even had an intention? or is the real matter what the art means to an individual? i’m sure we’ve all been in a situation similar to this scenario. as much as some of us do enjoy literature (i mean that in both the genuine and sarcastic sense), we’ve sat in a classroom and the teacher comments that in a particular text, the curtain is blue as it evokes feelings of sadness. and we’ve all thought “wow, that’s bullshit, the artist might have just made the painting’s blue”. i had this discussion with my literature teacher, and he made a point that the real interesting part is not the literature, but the perception from the audiences. a study took place where they got a few literature students and asked them to analyse a text. the text was made from a newspaper article about a car crash, but what the researcher’s did was use the exact word, but put sections in between them. this included starting new stanzas, pausing, adding sentences, just making the text look dissimilar from a newspaper article. the students, of course, didn’t think this was a newspaper article, and starting analysing what they thought was a poem and they came up with all sorts, building theories about what it meant, the narrative technique, etc. i thought this was fascinating, but i also concluded that literature isn’t the special part. neither is art, in my opinion. i believed the perception of the audience is the most spectacular part, and what people make of things. and this goes outside of art too. i like to hear people’s opinions on things, what they make of something, because viewpoints often reimagine the material you have in the first place, and allow you to see things within extraordinary lenses. this can be applied to anything, be it art, or discussion, but the human mind is filled with such curiosity and beauty, i reckon to be bored with life, you’d be mad.