Art: n,

Some ear-food to ingest while reading.

What is art?

A common definition of art would be "pretty things that hang on your wall". A modern definition is "Art is feeling". Ayn Rand said it best, "Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments." If there is one thing that Mrs. Rand and I can agree on, it's art.

What she meant, was that art is a what you choose to put in or omit. Imagine a painting of a house. The house is a little worn around the edges, a typical farm house along any country highway in Wisconsin. The artist can paint it with a dark, forboding sky, accenting the pealing paint and the missing shingles. This gives it a run-down, ruinus feel. Or he can paint it in bright sunlight, with a hard-working, wrinkled farmer in dirt-stained overalls leaning on a pitchfork with a smile on his face, while chickens run about his feet. This gives it a homely feel, a sharp contrast to the previous rendition. Nonetheless, they are the same house. But they express different values. The first one is a sad, hopeless outlook, where all mans creations will all be destroyed sooner or later. The second one shows the life where hard work pays off in knowing you did something. But which message the house contains is up to what the artist does or does not paint. After all, the devil's in the details.

The painting takes the abstract thought (the broken-down house being sad or joyful), and turns it into a contrete (the painting itself). The view can then take the concrete and turn it into the abstract. This is the goal of art, the transmition of abstract ideas. If the artist had wanted to simple show what the house was, it wouldn't be art; it would be journalism. Funny, if we assume all this is true, then many new stories are really works of art.

*AHEM*

But what about modern art? The concept behind modern art is to espress abstracts as abstracts. The Problem is that it is very hard to have an abstract exist in contrete. Modern art has no place outside of the look-pretty department. Some acually do look nice, (the non-paint-splatter ones, that is) if only because of the values in them.

Exibit A: An interesting painting that expresses an orgainized randomness. It takes primitives and tosses them together in a psudo-symetric pattern that hints at methodical madness. The colors follow no constant pattern, for that matter either. I like it, as it reminds me of my own life.

Bxibit B: Permiated by dark, earth tones, this one reminds me of that creepy goethe painting. You know, that one with that large, deformed, white haired beast eating a human? This really says little to me besides the somber mood created by the colors.

But these are just my reactions. Yours could be completly different. The artist could have meant exibt A to be a symble of the oppresed individual, and no on would have been the wiser. Exibit B is supposed to be a violin and a candlestick. Didn't see that one, did you? It is quite difficult for abstract art to express anything. And if you consiter the fact that most modernist artists hold nihalistic viewpoints, maybe that's a good thing.