Can anyone create art? Fu*k yes.
The idea that art only belongs to a selected few sickens me
It’s always fun to quote the Oxford Dictionary in order to debunk a myth, so here it goes. Art is defined as:
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.
Whilst one can easily understand the literal meaning of this definition, when you examine it under a microscope, what does it actually mean? How do you define what “creative skill” or “beauty” is. The only thing we can really extract from this is that art is created by humans, but even on that front lines are blurred these days as artists developed various tools (even artificial intelligence) to create art, so how if there is a piece co-created by a human and a bot, is it still art?
Lisa Marder once said that there isn’t a universal definition of what art is, but the general consensus is that it is a creation of something beautiful or meaningful using some sort of skill or imagination. Then she drive into the philosophical art of art in search of the meaning of it, pointing out that art can be seen as a form of representation (visually, it represents something), as an emotional expression (how it makes you feel, or makes you understand how the artist felt) or as form (so, Kant believed that there shouldn’t a concept of what art is and it should only be judged on “formal qualities”).
By applying the three dimensions mentioned above, art is meant to be something representative, pretty, makes us feel something and defies general norms. However, these dimensions are also quite full of nonsense. Anything can be a visual representation of something (e.g. oh this burnt toast looks like Jesus Christ the savior), anything can be pretty in the eyes of those who find them to be pretty, anything can make anyone feel something, because humans will always be creatures of feelings, and anything can be ground breaking depending on how to define what the ground is.
I am not trying to be super mean to Lisa Marder, or Kant, or the ancient Greeks, Romans and other philosophers who made some sort of attempt to explain art in carving out various categories, describing from various aspects, varying various variations to reach varied versions of everything (yeah, yawn, yawn yawn…), but I think, in some occasions, we humans love to over-complicate things in trying to dissect and distill some meaning, and we end up muddling the waters so often, we cannot see things clearly anymore.
Anything is art, that’s why anyone can create art!
I used to think that I appreciate certain artworks, because they reflect a certain level of craftsmanship and mastery of skills, but then I rebutted myself in asking myself “who am I the person to judge that a piece was executed under a certain level of skill and talent?”.
Nowadays, I think that everything created by a human being is art, may it be scribbling, blob of paint, or even just standing still in a public square doing nothing and not saying anything… everything is art as long as you did it deliberately for the sake of creation. Even copied art is art, advert pitches can be art, a restaurant menu can be art, and you only think they aren’t because you don’t find them appealing to you and you cannot find any emotional connection to it, but that doesn’t make them not art.
A prominent example would the infamous selfies and foodporn photos on IG. Some people find them pointless as its narcissistic and self-obsessed. If that is the case, why do we celebrate so many still life paintings of food on the table like Paul Gauguin, or self-portraits of artists like Van Gogh.
Friends of mine once laughed at how Kim Kardashian spend hours and took over 300 photos to achieve the “best” selfie, but then I wonder if Van Gogh spent even more time and effort to do his “selfie” in paint. Also, if you think that IG users are self-obsessed, try artists… aren’t they just as attention-seeking as everyone else?
So here’s the gist…
- Beauty is subjective.
- Emotional connection is subjective.
- Form is relative.
- Oil paint and IG filters are just tools of different eras.
Anyone can create art because anything created is art, because it is created by you.
Now, go pick up a phone, grab a paint brush, or do nothing whatsoever. Get out there, or stay in doors, whatever, and create!
(I want to make it clear here that, what art is, and what art is in the eyes of dealers and gallery owners are very different. That will require another art-related rant post at a later date.)
