Art: An essay into what it means.
Art should not be bound to please one’s morals or conform to ethical or societal norms. It is a medium to express reality. And the reality is absolute. It doesn’t bend to mortal norms. As we, as a civilization, become more “advanced”, we are losing our reliance on our emotions.
Our emotions, and more importantly, our conscious understanding of them, drove our lives and the destiny of humanity for many a millennium. Science, and with it, the school of objective absolution, came much later. Like any other tool presented to a primate, we too became obsessed, and eventually blinded by the efficiency, ease and effectiveness of this new tool. We seem to slowly forget the very nature of this school of thought.
Science is but one of the tools, or one of the myriad lenses, to understand and express reality. It is by no means, a singular peephole to reality. As any photographer who is worth his mettle would assure you, that every lens paints a different story of the same subject, we need different lenses to paint different pictures of our reality.
Many have said, art is meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted. In this new world of political correctness, art finds itself caged. It finds itself bound by norms, shaped by morals and baked by acceptance. This is no better than a horse running with blinders. This is an age of ebbing awareness, where taboo ideas are debated more openly, “un-common” human attributes are not just being normalized but empowered. Cultural differences are celebrated, sexual orientations are welcomed and finally, our civilization seems to be reaching a point of coherent diversity. But yet, art is not free.
Free art is seen as rebellious not because art is misunderstood. Art has simply moved further from us because we, as a civilization, have stopped using it as a lens. We have never been so distanced from our own emotions, that art has lost resonating with it. Therefore, we don’t misunderstand art, we have just lost our ability to understand it. There have been instances of art being branded, degraded or even shunned because it hurts people. Cases of deeply contemplated and finesse choreography have been branded pedophilic. It is simply not that there was no objection to such misunderstandings, what matters is that it was branded and shunned.
Such incidents not only showcase our obsession, or sometimes fear, to comply with political correctness and need to categorize everything into “the good” and “the bad”. They also reflect our insecurities; they show us how fragile our emotional constructs are. It is so concerning that something as primal as an expression of dark emotions through dance forms, should itself be considered dark, or bad. We fail to realize that art is an attempt to express and to understand a subject, it is not the subject itself.
Well-meaning people have tried to defend art by calling it innocent. I would argue otherwise. A piece of art is never innocent. Art is a result of diving so deep into oneself, that it is beyond the shallow depths of innocence. Art is bold, it is neither the truth nor a lie, it is neither innocent nor sinful. As it is in science, the validity of a principle does not depend on the morality or the acceptance of it, so it should be in art. Art should not be censored to comply with popular ideologies, it should be celebrated as a ubiquitous resource to inspire new perspectives and ideologies.
The beauty of any art does not lie with the emotions it incites within us; it is much more. Art is meant to throw people off from their emotions. To create a disconnect of a kind where one doesn’t understand or comprehend the very emotions that they feel. A sense of absolute silent enigma. Then, the beauty of the art is realized in the journey of coming to terms with those disjoint emotions. In realizing what they were. The real beauty of art lies in reconciliation with those disjointed emotions.
Art doesn’t beckon praise or appreciation, an artist does. It doesn’t need to be appreciated; it needs to be understood. It needs to be given the freedom to take you on a journey inside. Don’t stop art superficially because it is non-conforming, let it seep in. Let it tease your ideas, punch your notions, caress your feelings and curate your world. Once, it does its job, simply discard the fallen notions and walk away with the ones that stayed intact during the journey. Just because they were not strong enough to withstand the journey.
We, as a civilization, must move towards using the lens of art more often. To be closer to our emotions, to have enough understanding and control over them to not feel insecure when an ideology opposes yours. To navigate through your emotional self with as much ease as we do through our logical self. Only then can we truly realize art.
