Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Art.

Everyone loves art in some way or another, don't they?
I met a guy who says he just doesn't like music. Strikes you as odd, no?

I love music. I love art in general. I'm sure most people in most countries do as well.
But the whole concept of art is very frustrating.

There is the notion that art is what separates from the animals. But I wonder, is it?
Animals do mating dances and rituals, but only for the purpose of survival. They aren't able to process what they do as art, but does it take away the artistic merit of the act itself?

Humans misconstrue art itself as the separating factor but it is instead our ability to process and recognize art and the emotion that it may conjure.  Animals may behave in a way that one could interpret as artistic(dance is art?), but they cannot understand it.

What us dumbass humans end up doing is glorifying our expression without realizing what it is that caused it.
Most great art is from the perspective of the downtrodden, of the war stricken, the oppressed and forgotten.
We feel grand because of how we express our conquest but we fail to notice the terrible things we have to do to reach that point.

We aren't better than animals, or worse. Simply the same. Creatures of survival, varying degrees of strengths and weaknesses. We use art to express the overbearing domination we have of our own environment. Free from predators, we become hunters and prey. Free from explanations, we murder and pray.

The ability to comprehend art is how we have evolved. Our ability to use art to express grand emotional pain, plight and struggle, to symbolize and unify is our evolution, not our ability to create art.

Is modeling art? I suppose it is. Is taking a picture of an animal art? I suppose so.
Is a photograph art because it is a capture of our retinas ability to see it, or because we can understand the emotion behind it?

We feel so mighty for this, and our religions back us up as the true masters of this world. Made in God's image, unlike mere beasts. We can think and talk and write and pray and love! Pray to the right God and your golden as a human.
But no, we are savages, masquerading as advanced creatures of justice. People then choose based on their own worldview what sort of flaw caused this evil to come. What symbol, or note, produced this.
I find it strange when humans look at art and what corrupting powers an individual piece may contain. Art is simply our way of expressing some sort of manifestly inherent superiority over the animals we claim to be better than while still behaving as the savages we so righteously decry. All of man's expressed superiority is simply another mechanism of survival, and man's greatest survival tool is self-delusion. 

We delude ourselves with our arrogance, with our faith in omnipotence, our conviction of how far we have come already.
We create intricate defense systems for exposing human incompetence and intolerance, we blame other groups that look or pray similar, and we still cannot grasp that we are simply creatures of survival only, loving to survive, hating to survive, and creating art to survive.

The "starving artist" cliche maybe true or not true, but isn't art survival in the sense that you want someone, anyone, to view your thoughts and appreciate them? It may not be survival in a capitalist sense, but in an emotional one it is. 



The one who believe in God are the most deluded; The ones who believe in Man aren't far behind.
People use "ART" similar to "GOD", a means of distancing themselves from our simple minded creatures we inhabit the earth with. God in concept is quite comforting because it allows humans to lose the all consuming fear of death; Art is quite comforting in concept because art creates a barrier between expression and who is expressing it: someone could write an anti-NRA song, a fan would like the song out of hatred for the NRA, and simultaneously express disdain and cheer on the anti-NRA artist. Art allows us to express grandly but personally; God allows us to express personally but grandly. 


Neither God nor Art is inherently good nor evil, but art is not a myth, it is much more real.
God simply is art, a human story filled with details, morality, music and lessons. 
Art is a swastika and a peace symbol. Art is good, art is bad, art is interesting and boring and laudable and obscene.
But what art is simply what humans make it to be, in order to survive.

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