Culture Model

018-Culture Model
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Since my Art-Craft Model image was getting a little crowded, I decided to produce a different version to help explain what people mean by 'culture'. This ios my first version, and I am sure that I will be adjusting it and trying to make it more user friendly.

You can find many attempts in books, on courses or even on the internet where someone attempts to define what art is. They fail for many reasons, but one of the chief ones is that they fail to understand that a great chunk of culture is missing from the standard definitions. A good sign as to what is valued and what is ignored in society, and I do not mean what is good or bad, is how much language there is devoted to it. Cooking is chock full of language that is freely borrowed from other languages to express ingredients and methods. Here, though, that large white area exists without a vocabulary, and without a vocabulary something does not, or almost does not exist to most people.

A good and common example of this can be found here in Poland, where I live. I am English, but I am not described as a Polish-Englishman - yet if I were Polish and went and lived in the USA I could be a Polish-American. Culturally, I do not exist. My case might not seem important to you if you are not having to live a life of being a permanent outsider. Worse still is the case of Jewish people - neither English nor Polish have a term for Poles who are Roman Catholics, and therefore history texts talk about 'Poles' and 'Jews', as if 'Jews' were not Poles.

There are many unmapped areas of culture, and each removes the rights to be from those who exist in those areas in favour of those who lived in well-marked areas.

My Art, that little note below the question mark, sits in the unmarked zone - you cannot ignore it because it has Art, and yet it would be difficult to sell it because the lack of Craft is so obvious. If, instead of photographs, you saw my actual Art as thoughts about how humans interact with human systems, and realized that the photographs - and graphs like this - were nothing more than attempts to communicate to you from a land with little vocabulary, then is the lack of Craft in the photographs so important? The high Craft elements of my Art are largely invisible and yet in my working life continual to generate irregular extra income. How? Well, once I transform my Art into a visible concept - some diagrams for example, they change the way managers think about their industry, their departments or whatever.

Their are many ways that I use to communicate my Art, and I do not have time to become high Craft in each method - there are too many, and I rather need the time to perfect my Art.

If any of my images or my texts alters your perception of the world, then my Art has touched you - even though it might be through an imperfectly utilised channel of communication.