Buddha with the elixir for healing suffering
"It is a work of art because an artist says it is; because it occupies the place of art (the wall, a pedestal); because it's worth so much money; because you perceive it to be art."
The Essential Man Ray by Ingrid Schaffner
Reading The Essential Man Ray this morning while waiting for my body to get out of bed was one of those quintessential moments that liberate thinking from confines it didn't even know were there.
Driving to lunch I listened to World Have Your Say on public radio. The topic: Is it possible to have a moral army. I had jumped into the middle of the vociferous discussion but during all the time I listened to the broadcast no one, neither the moderator nor the participants, challenged the notion of "moral." What is moral, and is there one standard for morality for everyone? A former general spoke of the rules and standards much of the world recognizes like the Geneva Conventions, treaties and protocols set up in 1949 the aftermath of World War II. Contravening the conventions would be immoral, the general said.
It seems to me morality and art both sink or float in the same or similar boat. We have history as variously interpreted by experts to form some basis for what many people intuitively, or at least, subjectively feel is right or wrong, is artistic or not artistic. My own personal history argues that history, conventional and personal, changes. When I first saw modernist art I was appalled. What was I seeing? This is beautiful?
I've clung to old-fashioned, third-world conventions all this time. People born in wealthy, developed nations grow up confident that what they and their society believe is correct, so correct that other nations who think otherwise are backward and need to be converted to the right way of thinking. But these fortunate/unfortunate people are also more likely to spawn rebels and innovators. Westerners have evolved generally high self-esteem. The individual sprang out of the masses in the aftermath of the Middle Ages. As burghers grew riches that challenged then outshone those of the ruling, aristocratic classes, an individual grew to believe he could be what he chooses to be. Society is something he can change.
Admittedly most grow up and function as obedient adults. They live out what morals or artistic sensibilities they were taught or somehow absorbed living in the medium of their society's religious, political and economic realms. But for some people, whether because they feel inordinately confident of their own vision or intellectual take on a subject matter or because they don't fit the mold and struggle to make the mold fit them, they poke holes in the frayed fabric of conventional wisdom and show the way to other ways of believing, other ways of thinking, even other ways of feeling.
So much of art is feeling but did I mention economics? Money might be lucre but lots of it gives luster to the thing that requires so much to acquire. We love to shop at high-end boutiques because looking at all that expensive stuff we feel we too are valued and beautiful.
Years ago I debated with a friend who was studying voice at Butler. Western classical music is largely Teutonic music. I do find Schubert or Strauss lieder incomprehensibly moving but I argued that what moved us was acquired taste. I remember listening over and over to recordings of Teresa Braganza before I learned about opera and lyric sopranos. In Manila, surrounded by dusty, tired, poor compatriots I dreamed of a better world where I too would enjoy the elegant and sophisticated lifestyle my girlfriend and her family took for granted simply because they had the money to expose themselves to expensive objects and activities.
An art object is expensive a priori because of the time and energy that the artist invested in creating it. The actual creation might take a few seconds, a few strokes of the brush or keyboard, but the gestative phase is the artist's whole life.
How do we define morals or art? In fact how do we define values, what we rank higher when we make choices or decide for or against anything? And digging a few more miles under the surface, do we decide on the basis of values or simply react? If the latter, society bears the brunt of responsibility for our inattentive action-taking. If the former, we take on responsibility for what we choose to do. Creating, producing, photographing, editing: all involve choices. The artist perhaps more than most people have to be self-conscious about the choices she makes. It's that consciousness that gives value to what she creates.
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