I suppose consciousness is easier to define than art. Some would disagree. Well, always. Right? I'll tell you, though: I wrote an article that I believed nailed it on what art was. I wrote this article on the website Helium. On this site, fellow writers rank the cogency of your article. Boy, it made my head spin how fast others started writing about the subject and quickly ranked my article as the least valuable of the lot. Which only goes to show me that nobody likes to be told what art is. Beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that.
Well, be that as it may, I still believe I know what art is. Too bad if you don't like my definition. I've given the matter a LOT of thought - say, 35 or so years; actually, more. I've been thinking about art ever since I was a kid. I grew up in a family of artists. I'm 46.
Not every artist gives the matter - of what art is - a lot of thought. One artist, a film director, as I recall, on Terry Gross's Fresh Air radio program, claimed he didn't like to think about the creative process because it took out the mystery. I surely don't agree. I don't care how much I think about the process of making art: I'll never figure it out.
In another article, I wrote about how consciousness was the act of perceiving. I'll stand by that statement. If you want to know more about my definition, look up the article.
If you agree to the definition, I would think it would be easy to also agree that art is a form of consciousness, at least a record of it. In art, the artist perceives. He also creates. Creativity and perception are simultaneous, synchronous, and, to a large degree, analogous. I have said so in the article on Consciousness. That doesn't make it so. But, well, it is what I believe. We could argue. Let's not.
To perceive, you must create. To create, you must perceive. The artist painting a picture of his subject must perceive the subject. He does so through paint. That is, he redefines the subject using the medium of paint and its restructuring of reality according to its own order and hierarchies. The barn is going to look different through the eyes of a painter: Compare his perception to that of a scientist or engineer. We all see the barn differently. Two painters will not see the barn in the same way.
The way we structure reality is the way we perceive. It is also the way we create. What is art? It is a way that we communicate perception. It is also a way we record perception. Indeed, if we could not record information, could we perceive? Memory is fundamental to human perception. The records of perceptions are part of the information we must gather to achieve new perceptions. What is a new perception? I would say that all perceptions are new. If they are old, they are no longer perceptions.
The recording of a perception must be perceived again and again for it to function and for it to have meaning. Art works this way. Every viewer becomes a co-creator. You see the art differently from the way I see the art.
Let us say that the newness of perception, that is, the quality of a perception that makes it something new and fresh, is vision. An artist must have a vision. (Only one? At least one.) Giacometti said so. He's not the only artist to have made this statement in one way or another.
Thus, art symbolizes the newness quality of perception. Thus, artists are pioneers. They must be. And so they are.
By: Beau Smith
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