What is Art and who are we becoming?
Man, those are the 2 questions I’ve been asking myself for 9 months now. I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m working on it every day. And maybe, just maybe, that’s actually the answer we all look for: working on it.
To me, there are different kinds of art, I can see at least two:
- there’s Art with the big A exposed in museums
- there’s art linked to day to day creativity, art therapy, industrial design and nowadays art directly glued to the www
Museums contain a lot of shit, exposed for bad reasons founded on stupid criteria. But they also contain genuine jewels of human genius. I think of Michelangelo’s “pieta”, of Vermeer’s “girl with the pearl”, of Picasso’s “guernica”, of De Kooning’s “palisade”, of Soulage’s “outrenoirs”, of Van Gogh’s “night sky”, … From time to time, an artist hits the nerve center of human sensitivity, touching with the tip of his brush the absolute, the divine or whatever you would like to call it. And it’s absolutely necessary that those few artworks are exposed in museums where everyone can see them, instead of hanging on the wall or in the safe of some tycoons. The first time I saw a painting of Francis Bacon in a museum in Madrid, I had tears in my eyes. The impact of it on my emotional state was simply overwhelming. So yes, museums are necessary and those art geniuses exist.
As for the second type of art (I gave it a small A, but with no negative feelings attached), thank God or Buddha or whoever for its existence. Being able to share the results of your work is such a wonderful opportunity, even if it’s not always as satisfying as you’d want. The internet is such a tremendous source of inspiration and every single day I am thrilled by the explosions of megatons of creativity I see here. So many people spend time drawing, designing, expressing themselves through artwork. That’s not only fun to see, it’s also something very reassuring, compared to the atrocities vomited out on the news and on TV.
We live a revolution, this really is the age of Aquarius people.
And I don’t think that the immense quantity of artwork shared on the web is a problem. There is no risk for overload. Art should be everywhere. It’s already on some city walls. It should be on our clothes, on furniture, on our cars.
The only real regret I have is that there’s so few real communication associated to this exchange of paintings. It’s nice to read “great job”, “I love your work” and “you’re such a cool artist” in response to a published artwork. Why do so few people ask questions about what they see? Why don’t we expose more of our thoughts, dreams and emotions attached to the pictures? After all, people who spend hours on Behance or Pinterest are mostly interested in the same things.
Art is the attempt to develop a language capable to transmit your own humanity full of emotions, dreams and questions to others.
A language without the approximation of words, a telepathic vibration transcending the mind with the utopic hope to touch a human soul. A celebration of the idea of being human and being alive.
