The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> just what is "Art" anyway?

just what is "Art" anyway?
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Saturday, January 25 2014, 21:05:49 (UTC)
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The best answer is: anything you want it to be. I say it's the best answer because it's the one that prevails, the one we've come to accept, whether we are embarrassed to admit it, and its implications, or not. I've been making sculpture for forty years and I can't define art. I don't know how to measure “talent” except I like Henry Miller's definition of talent as “caring”...caring a lot.

One thing I am certain of though is that I look for skill, great skill, alongside talent before I am impressed or even moved because the greater the skill the more likely is it that talent, however much of it there may be, will have its best chance of getting to me. And there is no good reason for an artist NOT to be highly skilled. That's the “perspiration” part.

Sure, you may have this “thing” welling up inside of you, but if you're not able to express it well and convey it to me (who doesn't know what is welling up inside you), with a skill-set that can wipe away the fact that it's YOUR feeling, initially,  and not mine, then I'm apt to miss the point or care not at all

You can be clever, and modern, about it, for instance, and display an actual empty canvass and call that “Emptiness”...or, you can develop your skills so that you can paint an actual human, or landscape, with an expression or in a manner that conveys emptiness. One is clever, the other takes more than a “concept”...it takes actual doing. And I respect the doing at least as much as I value talent. One, without the other, is less than enough, and it is less than Art, to me at least.



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