Thursday, March 22, 2012

Chill your art out

Art, as the way it is commonly perceived, has blown up into a monstrous egotistically charged behemoth.  and I think the culprit is a false shift in credit.


When a painter paints, she has produced a work of art and all the credit that that particular painter deserves ENDS THERE.  When someone looks at the painting and is inspired to revolutionize the education system of the world, and effectively does it, all that credit belongs to that person and no one else.  it was the veiwer of the painting who made the mental/emotion connection between the painting and her goal.  The painting did nothing, and therefore the painter did nothing  The painter should receive no credit for the actions triggered by his painting because the actual triggering isn't happening within the painting, but within the mind of the veiwer, therefore a new work of art is made, being the mental connections made in the mind of the veiwer, and all proceeding actions should be credited to that and nothing else.


The problem is with this seemingly innocent slip of credit from the artistic workings of someone's mind to the artistic workings of someone else's hand/mouth/eye/etc. is a dangerous slippery slope.  Dangerous in that it ultimately affects the progress of us as the human race.  How? because it then leads to a falsely inflated ego of the wrongly credited individual, which makes that person feel entitled to certain privileges which he receives because enough people who have mistakenly credited him also agree, which privileges are then coveted by many other people, which enacts actions that put those people into positions to have their egos artificially inflated, and then the culmination of all these overly inflated egos causes the whole system to receive much more attention then is necessary for its survival which gets in the way of the progress of other equally and potentially more important art forms for the overall survival of living organisms.


Imagine how different the world would be if social workers, artists in the field of people, received as much praise and attention as the current popular movie star.  People would leave there country homes and friends, sell all they belongings to move to the big city to understand people better so that they can walk down the street and see people goggle-eye them and kiss their feet.  The indirect product of this:  books upon books, papers upon papers, schools upon schools, filled with information on who we are as people, for anyone to soak up and use to improve their life.  And everyone would because that is the thing to do.


Imagine if there were award ceremonies on the same level of grandeur as the grammys for artists in the field of disease prevention.  Crowds of people would be racing to be the best disease fighter just to get that golden respect.  the indirect result:  We would become a kick-ass disease busting human race.



The only reason it isn't this way is because there isn't any glamor in those fields, and the only reason there isn't any glamor is because for generations,  people have been unconsciously dealing out credit incorrectly, and possibly the only reason people have been doing this is because the workings of the mind in this form isn't widely enough considered art.


How do we fix this problem?  if it is a problem............

2 comments:

  1. I'm about to write a school paper about art using this definition: art is the process of connecting two or more ideas.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I approve. Go forth my son and infect the minds with our plague!!!!!!

    ReplyDelete