But
Art's purpose doesn't have anything to do with
money, really, so it gets
ignored.
The purpose of Art,
simply, is to provide a
method of understanding that
transcends or
sidesteps our *normal* methods of
thinking. This is
invaluable to
human development, you know; if there isn't a
new way to
discover things, there isn't much
new to
discover.
And the "what is
Art?" question is
totally unanswerable, by the way. It's a
completely subjective thought. If something
moves you to an understanding somehow
unreachable for you by the
common paths of words and
reason, it's Art for you. The
butterfly that
landed on
Patch Adams and made him
realize that his
dead girlfriend would
never really die was, to him, Art. Art is,
in short, the name we give to the carriers of
divine revelation; an
artist is one who--no matter how--
produces things that (even in one person)
induce this kind of
quantum understanding. Something that
tickles one's fancy is not Art. Something
pretty is not necessarily Art, though
extreme beauty has been known to
shock people into understanding on occassion (re: The
Mona Lisa,
Sistine Chapel, etc.). But in order to determine if,
say,
Shakespeare's tenth
sonnet is Art, I'd have to ask around
indefinitely--if I found a person who'd been
moved by it in the above ways, it's Art, at least once. If I don't find anybody
thus impressed, well, maybe I haven't looked hard enough.
Does that make
everything Art in potentia? Yeah, I think so. Art is a
process, a
dialog, not a
cause-and-effect like many people seem to think. So maybe the
can of dogshit perched on a
yellow pedastal isn't going to be very
widely effective Art; granted. But are you
willing to bet that there isn't a
single human being out there who has the
right things in him to, combined with a
can of crap on a yellow pedastal, produce
revelation-style understanding? I'm not. I've gotten it from
cheese.
ADDENDUM (a
day later): I have no idea what to
make of all your
obsessions with
Art-Science. I don't think of
Art and
Science as
brothers fighting for
rational recognition, or as
Doozers building
desperately towards the
Ceiling of All Things...I think of them as two of the
Endless Things; two
concepts so
old and so
large to us that trying to find
commonalities between them is like trying to get the
Gods to take a
personality test in Cozmo. So...as
interesting as the
rest of this argument became, I think I'm gonna
step off and shut my mouth for once, and leave *this* node as it stands. Er...
even though it pissed you off,
Sarcasmo.