Research Found That Fine Art Majors Are No Better at Nonverbal Decoding Than Math Science Majors

The give-and-take of the foibles and failures of modern art that appeared here ii weeks ago was of class not the final word on that vast and intricate subject. This week I want to take the give-and-take further, starting from a deceptively elementary question: what is fine art for?  What's the point or purpose of all these odd, impractical aspects of human culture we call the arts?

In the contemporary industrial globe at that place are iii commonplace answers to that question, and a great deal of the applesauce and ugliness that passes for art these days is a directly effect of the coaction between the first ii of those answers. Let's have them one at a time.

The start of them, the i you lot'll well-nigh oft hear from people who think they take fine art seriously, is that art is a vehicle for cocky-expression. Whose self, though, gets expressed?  That'south a loaded question. On the one hand, y'all have the merits that in that location are sure very special people who are so bursting with creative oomph, or alternatively and so tormented past emotions far more interesting than yours and mine, that anything they make is fine art, just because they're the ones who go far.  If a 7-year-old boy finds a discarded urinal and hangs it on a wall, that's a prank, but when Marcel Duchamp did it, the consequence was a work of art. Why? Because he was Marcel Duchamp, that's why, and undiluted artsyness oozed out of every pore of his body. This view is understandably very popular among professional artists, who similar to think that all the student loans they took out to become their MFAs guarantee them a corresponding state of specialness.

On the other hand, yous have the merits that everybody is an creative person, that everybody ought to limited themselves whether or not they have any fleck of talent or technical skill, and so we all ought to have turns politely applauding each other's creations, no affair how atrocious those may be. This is the mental attitude that gives ascension to the enthusiastic mediocrity of the Neopagan bardic circles nosotros discussed two weeks ago:  if everybody is only as much of an artist as anybody else, and making people feel good most their creative product is all that matters, so you're pretty much guaranteed a race to the bottom in which everyone who values quality finds somewhere else to exist, leaving the field to poetry that would gag a Vogon, with musical accompaniment to match. This view is understandably very pop amidst people who are bad at art, since it gives them an excuse to claim that their fine art really is just as good equally anyone else's.

Conspicuously, so, both versions of the claim that self-expression is the purpose of fine art have serious downsides. It might be possible to finesse the issue one way or some other while still preserving the claim, but it's been tried over and once more for something like a century now with very dubious results—I'thou thinking here, among other things, of all the years Arthur Danto put into trying to arts and crafts a theory of fine art that would brand room for disused urinals, not to mention Andy Warhol's hilarious jokes at the expense of the art scene. However flawed the theory of art as self-expression might be, though, information technology'due south a good deal less problematic than the second commonplace respond I want to discuss, which is that art exists to produce assets for investment.

In calling this a commonplace theory of art, I'm stretching the point a scrap, considering you won't hear many people maxim this out loud in public. On the other mitt, it dominates the way that fine arts are actually produced and marketed in the industrial globe today. Especially but not but on the high-priced end of the fine art world, paintings, sculptures, and the like are bought and sold in exactly the same spirit, and for exactly the aforementioned motives, every bit stocks, bonds, and other fiscal assets are traded. These days, people with money want to notice something to serve equally a store of wealth, and where there's a need, there will inevitably be a supply—even if what's being marketed as a way to store wealth has no intrinsic worth at all.

So far, this way of thinking about art is generally confined to painting, sculpture, and those other arts that typically discover their style into fine art museums. A few musicians have figured out how to cash in on the same market place—the group Wu-Tang Clan, for case, has recorded at least 1 album of which there is only one copy in existence, for sale as an investment asset at a stratospheric cost—and of grade writers have been turning out expensive express editions of their work for a long time now. No doubt other arts will get into the market earlier the fad runs its form.

The unabridged contemporary fixation on finding ways to store wealth, mind y'all, is a sign of serious economic dysfunction. In a healthy economy, people with coin to spare put it into investments that produce wealth, and thus get a bigger share of the pie by helping make the pie larger. I of the bright red flashing lights warning of severe trouble in the modern industrial world is that in many countries—the U.s.a. among them—the barriers to productive economical activity have risen so loftier that about investment money goes into unproductive assets instead. Instead of helping to produce wealth, these assets merely store information technology.  More precisely, they store a notional merits on wealth, which may or may non be convertible into actual wealth when push comes to shove.

We'll talk another fourth dimension nigh how the barriers to productive economic activity got there and whose interests they serve. The point I desire to make here is that in an economy such every bit ours, where people are trying to store wealth rather than produce information technology, anything that in theory will continue its value over the long term can be turned into an investment asset. That's not but a theoretical argument, either; right now, merely about annihilation collectible that has a toll worth noticing is being snapped upward as an investment nugget by somebody or other. My guess is that this entire process is following the familiar dynamics of a speculative bubble, and a vast amount of the modern art, antique piece of furniture, old baseball trading cards, and other declared stores of wealth volition end up being worth far less than their current confront value one time the market place for stores of wealth peaks and the panic selling begins; still, we'll see.

Hither again, though, I want to focus on the impact such shenanigans take on art. The Big Proper noun Painter we discussed ii weeks agone, who presides over an creative sweatshop and does null to the paintings that are supposedly his but sign his name to them, is a successful manufacturer of investment vehicles, not an creative person in any sense that matters. Even in terms of the definition discussed above, that of art as self-expression, he falls flat; the only thing being expressed past his creative sweatshop is that memorable maxim of Ben Franklin's about a fool and his money. There are plenty of other people busily expressing that same maxim, in and out of the arts scene; I admit to a certain preference for those who don't pretend to be artists, equally more often than not they're less pompous almost their moneygrubbing than those who do.

Permit's move on to the third commonplace answer virtually the purpose of art. The outset ii are past and large plant amongst professional person artists, those who buy works by professional artists, and those who aspire to belong to one of these two categories. The third is institute among those—the great majority these days—who have no interest in the highbrow earth of artists and art critics, who don't claim to know art, but simply know what they similar. Their thesis, equally frequently as non expressed in so many words, is that the purpose of art is to provide enjoyment to its audition.

That'southward a theory of fine art that professional artists and their academic hangers-on dearest to denounce, but it's honest, and information technology reflects a straightforward reality. Outside of the narrow confines of the fine-fine art manufacture and its clientele, about people who buy a painting do and then because they recall they will enjoy looking at it. The vast bulk of people listen to the kinds of music they do, read the books they do, accept in the plays and movies and other performances they do, considering they enjoy these things. What's more, they very often spend equally much as they can afford on these things, and since they outnumber the clientele of the fine arts by myriads to one, their theory of art has serious economical consequences; a painting by a Big Name Painter costs a lot more than a cheap paperback novel, simply only the highest echelon of Big Name Painters tin can count on equaling or exceeding the annual income of a reasonably successful author of popular novels.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the enjoyment theory of fine art is that information technology applies merely every bit effectively to highbrow as to lowbrow art. In that location are, later all, indirect as well every bit direct means of enjoyment. The truck driver or waitress reading a trashy novel gets direct enjoyment out of it, and the aforementioned can be said of the very few readers these days who tin honestly take in avant-garde literature for the pleasure of it. For those who can't, though, advanced literature offers an indirect enjoyment, in that its readers can preen themselves on non existence the kind of people who enjoy trashy novels. Snobbery is a source of enjoyment, after all, and a slap-up many works of art these days are explicitly designed to provide serious snob value to their purchasers.

The difficulty with this theory is simply that it doesn't explain enough. Information technology's an interesting fact of the history of the arts that many of the best creative and critical minds of modern times, people who had or take a keen enjoyment of the highest end of creative creation, too have had a robust appetite for lowbrow trash. William Butler Yeats is a favorite case of mine: one of the greatest poets in the English language, and the winner of a well-deserved Nobel Prize in literature, he besides delighted in cheap detective thrillers. I don't recall anyone has ever suggested that he valued them as much as he valued serious literature, or that he confused the two; he enjoyed them in dissimilar ways. More precisely, he got i kind of enjoyment from both of them, but a 2d kind of enjoyment out of the serious literature lonely.

This isn't an uncommon experience, and it happens to many readers as they get older. I'll use myself equally an case. As a boy and a young man, I adored trashy fantasy novels, and got a vast amount of enjoyment out of even the trashiest. (Lin Carter, I'm looking at you.) The literary end of the fantasy genre, by contrast, baffled me and left me common cold. These days, later another thirty years of reading, the former is still true only the latter is not; I still delight in the trashy fantasy of my insufficiently misspent youth, but these days I tin also have down a volume of Due east.R. Eddison's Zimiamvian trilogy, say, and lose an evening in that very literary work of fantasy fiction. What's more, I get something out of Eddison's richly adult tale that I don't get out of a book of the adventures of Thongor of Lemuria.

Both stories give me the basic enjoyment I expect to get from good fiction—the temporary immersion in imaginary but vivid and interesting lives (i.e., there are characters) where the sequence of events makes sense (i.e., in that location's a plot) and moves toward some kind of emotionally satisfying resolution (i.east., there'southward a denouement).  Both stories also requite me the distinctive enjoyments that I expect to get from a fantasy novel—the sense of wonder, the delight in a rousing tale, the peculiar rush that comes from taking in an imaginary earth where all the rules are different. Even so there's something else present in the Eddison novel, something that's nowadays in the all-time fantasy novels—and also in the best of other kinds of literature—that'due south simply not there in Lin Carter's endearingly clunky retreads of the pulp-magazine fantasies of his youth.

What Eddison's stories accept and Carter'southward lack, if I may slap a characterization on the experience and then get back and explicate it, is a kind of mimesis.

Fine art is a means—the only i nosotros've come with so far, despite a vast amount of tinkering on the function of assorted mad scientists—of enabling one person to share, in some sense, in another person'south experience of the earth. Retrieve of the statue of Dainichi Nyorai, the Great Sunday Buddha, nosotros discussed two weeks ago. The unknown sculptor who carved it was almost certainly a Buddhist monk, and likely belonged to the Shingon school, one of the 2 branches of Japanese Buddhism that go into the mandalas and esoteric teachings most people these days acquaintance with Tibet. His etching was an expression of the soaring spiritual vision at the heart of the Shingon school, the sense that this very world with all its follies and vices, just equally it is, is the expression of the space enlightened consciousness symbolized past Dainichi Nyorai. Sit down in front of the statue, open up yourself to information technology, and you tin can sense something of what that unknown monk experienced in his meditations, reflected in the work of his hands. For a moment, yous're non limited to thinking your own thoughts—yous can experience at to the lowest degree a dim echo of another's.

Plough to the other case I cited two weeks ago, the Paris morn streetscape past Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont, and the same principle applies. There are enough of paintings of Paris that are right down at that place with Lin Carter's fantasy novels in their enthusiastic deployment of pre-chewed clichés, merely this is not one of them. Information technology'southward not Paris seen through your eyes or the lens of a generic camera; it's Paris equally Sarazin de Belmont saw it that morning, gazing out through a window of the Louvre, watching a domestic dog—not a generic dog, mind yous, simply that dog, at that moment—run out barking at that horse, seeing that sun through those hazy clouds, communicable that 1 of the countless subtle moods of a Paris morning time, and capturing it in pigment on canvas.

The distinction between cliché and personal vision is also the divergence between the ii categories of fantasy mentioned above. Read a volume of Thongor of Lemuria and the thoughts that you're experiencing are utterly familiar, the generic mindset of pulp fantasy, replayed in an endless loop with just the near minor variations. Read a book of the Zimiamvian trilogy and the thoughts you lot're experiencing are unique to Eddison. Yous get to encounter how someone else thinks and feels and experiences life. In the process, the range of thoughts you lot're capable of thinking and feelings you're able to experience gets expanded. That's what I mean past mimesis:  the experience of a piece of work of genuine art guides you toward new ways of being in the world.

I don't get that experience when I look at the bland, technically crude, utterly self-referential product of the current artistic avant-garde. Neither do the vast majority of people these days. It's fashionable to insist that this is considering the vast majority of people are incapable of affectionate existent art, but let us delight exist real: until the last decades of the nineteenth century, that wasn't the case anywhere in the western world. Painters, sculptors, composers, dramatists, poets, and other producers of fine arts had the kind of fandom that rock stars have today, because they turned out brilliant works that ordinary people could understand and capeesh.

That changed merely when artists bought into the notion that you can tell how proficient an artwork is by the number of people it excludes. That'due south when the visual arts fled from representational themes into abstraction, when avant-garde music abandoned tonality, when poets ditched rhyme and meter, and when the fine arts mostly embraced the pursuit of deliberate ugliness as a key strategy. If your artwork's supposed quality, and (more to the signal) its take chances of being approved by critics and snapped upward past investors, depends on making sure that most people don't like information technology, removing everything from art that makes information technology appeal to audiences—well, other than the snob value discussed earlier—is a great way to false artistic genius.

Every pendulum has its return swing, though, and the motion dorsum the other manner is already taking shape. True to course, information technology'southward non taking shape among the habitués of the art scene, who are notwithstanding caught up in the trends just outlined. It'southward taking shape elsewhere, among artists and audiences that take embraced the tertiary definition discussed to a higher place—the thought that the point of art is to provide enjoyment to its audition—and who are moving in various ways toward the fourth definition, as artists in any number of popular media achieve the kind of personal vision that makes the experience of mimesis a source of please for their audiences.

It'due south safe to predict, in fact, that no one a century from now will retrieve the producers of the highbrow trash that currently clutters up art museums, conservatories, literary bookstores, and the like today. It'south safe to predict that, in turn, considering we've been here before. Enough of Oxford and Cambridge graduates wrote masques for the English upper classes in the sixteenth century; they're forgotten past everyone but a few academic specialists, while William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, who wrote pop drama for the mass market, are still having their plays produced today. Many people alive today will recall "Oo, Those Awful Orcs," the 1956 essay in which the immensely influential critic Edmund Wilson dismissed J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as "juvenile trash;" Wilson is all but forgotten today and the fantasy author he preferred to Tolkien, James Branch Cabell, more thoroughly forgotten even so, while Tolkien's trilogy is on runway to be remembered every bit one of the 20th century'due south great works of literature.

Where the pendulum's swing might lead is an interesting question, and one that circles back to themes I've been discussing on this and previous blogs for some time at present. We'll discuss it further in posts to come.

*********************

Meanwhile, with an center toward moving from contemplation to activeness, I have the first of two new writing contests to announce. (The 2d volition exist appear in a couple of weeks.) The conversations that followed final week'south open post here revealed the fact that several regular readers and commenters are successful writers of romance fiction—the well-nigh unfairly despised of modern popular fiction genres—and I half-jokingly suggested an anthology combining that genre and the kind of deindustrial future explored in the four After Oil anthologies. I promptly fielded a flurry of requests from writers who wanted to submit stories, and and so we're going to do it.

Dear in the Ruins will be an anthology of brusk fiction in the romance genre fix in the kind of future we're actually going to become—a futurity shaped by the slow decline and fall of industrial civilization, brought about past the depletion of the natural resources on which it depends and the disruption of the ecological systems on which it's equally dependent. Infinite travel and the residual of the panoply of shiny new technologies with which people these days like to stock their imaginary futures?  Forget about it.  Instead, call up economic contraction, the abandonment of high-end technologies, all the familiar processes through which civilizations slowly give manner to dark ages and dark ages give way to the rise of successor cultures. (No, stories almost apocalypse aren't of interest either—those are just as hackneyed and unrealistic as the shopworn Star Trek fantasy of perpetual progress outward to the stars.)

In an age of decline and fall, or the ages of turmoil and rebuilding that come later on it, people will yet fall in love. That'south the bones theme of the romance genre: two people autumn in love and, overcoming whatever obstacles stand in their way, live happily ever subsequently. Stories accepted for this anthology will follow that basic outline. Delight note that I'm not specifying genders or, for that matter, species for the two romantic leads; that'due south up to y'all. Sex is fine, though delight exit out the grunt-and-squirt sort of detail; if you lot desire to practise an old-fashioned romance where the curtain comes downward as the protagonists kiss for the first fourth dimension, that'due south fine as well.

I'm looking for 15 or so short stories between three,000 and 8,000 words, and volition also include i or two novelettes of upwardly to 15,000 words. I'm also looking for 4 to six poems, and it's merely fair to note that I'one thousand seriously prejudiced in favor of short poems rather than long ones, and of sometime-fashioned poetic forms rather than shapeless costless verse—write a sonnet, a villanelle, or something else that rhymes and scans elegantly and your chances of acceptance volition go way up.

We'll be using the aforementioned submissions method that worked so well with the After Oil anthologies. In one case yous've got your story written, mail service it on a free website then brand a comment on the most contempo postal service of this blog, letting me and other readers know where they tin can  read information technology. Payment will depend on the contract I work out with the publisher—yeah, this is going to be published, and yeah, it's going to be a paying gig; I'll post the details here as we work them out.

So get to work with the long sultry glances in crumbling cities and the feverish kisses in sheltered glades in the tropical jungles of 30th-century Pennsylvania. All submissions must be received past May 1, 2019.

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Source: https://www.ecosophia.net/what-is-art-for/

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