More on What Art Is

Art is completely independent of the tools you use to express it, your art resides inside your head, and you can use whatever tools you like to with any degree of skill that you possess to demonstrate that art, through whatever medium you choose. Aside from the requirements of some art course or the necessity to sell or otherwise dispose of your pieces, there are no categories of art, only your satisfaction in what you achieve.

To get others to appreciate what you have achieved, you have to go through a process of coding their brains with information and processes they can use to understand your work, which is both an important process and one laden with problems. the biggest problem other people will lay before you, or perhaps attempt to bludgeon you with, is the idea of purity. By purity, I mean how close your work resembles some category system in their head, either based on some kind of classical-historical golden age (Ancient Greek, for example), or teenage memories (i.e. wot i lurnt on my art course).

Since art really happens in your head, you have to keep thinking about it. I recently saw someone respond to someone's image on flikr, saying that they did not want to say why they liked a picture, that it was nice was enough. Well, they are free not to write, free even not to think, but it is that process of thinking that forms our Art and our Craft. Our Craft guides the tools that we use, but only in replication of the pattern in our mind that is our Art. Both processes need extensive thought, for without that thought both or either our Art or Craft will remain juvenile.

Talking about Art in terms of labels, categories is nothing more than a form of Craft, these are tools that we use to describe our Art, not the Art itself. What is more scary is that we lack vocabulary to describe in anything but the tritist of terms. This is partly due to the advanced thought that is Art, located ahead of Craft description, but mainly due to very Craft orientated education systems which leave us able to count and list information, but unable to express why we think something is nice without wandering off into a dim and distant geek-land of which most people lack an atlas.

I think it might be the lack of any requirements for skill in tools that would be the stumbling block for many people - the idea that you could pick up a paint brush and slap paint on a canvas and say you have produced Art seems to hit the brick wall of common sense. However, you are not just splodging in a juvenile way, because what you should have formed in your head is a mature Art form, whatever that may be, and you are now using whatever tools that come to hand to produce a hard copy of that Art idea. When Jackson Pollock 'splodged' some paint on large sheets, he had a mature Art image in his head, but what many people thought they were seeing were there own juvenile art thoughts 'splodged', they expected Art to be painterly. Painterly, or fine art, is a mix of Art and Craft, the latter to a high level, the former to some level between juvenile and mature, depending on artist and his or her intentions.

What is really strange to me, is the problem that some artists have with commercial work, as if an external trigger for an idea is somehow worse than an internal one. At some stage, somewhere, every artist is supported by commercial work, even if they are living off family money, that money arrived in the family through some striving or other. Selling one's own Art is still commercial. Artists hating the fact they have to engage in commercial work is very elitist, does the worker in a factory have that choice, how many are blocked from their Art by their need to feed their family and because their education failed to instil in them a sense of their own Art? If an artist fails to create Art in their commercial work, they are not thinking enough about what they are doing, even having to satisfy the needs of others, even the strange requirements of the customer, is in essence an opportunity for more Art expression, no matter how bitter might be the task. Dislike is merely opportunity unrecognised.