Art is not in the eye of the beholder
An introduction and a few thoughts on what makes art "art".
Photo by the author
Dear reader,
In my many years of writing, either for advertising or for the elusive you, I have learned a thing or two about the human condition, but I never once got close to a real recipe for coming up with great art. Whatever form that may take. Far from me to say I’m alone in this struggle, as history can give us many examples. How many (now) legendary artists were ignored when they were alive, cursed to only reach immortality after death? How many giants of their time are now but a footnote in the great book of artistic expression? Nobody seems to know what it is that actually goes into making art that will last for ages. What’s the secret sauce, what can the artist control and what can she not? What makes art “art”?
But since this is the first in what I hope to be a series of many interesting (entertaining?) pieces of writing, I should perhaps tell you a bit about myself before jumping into the topic at hand. Mind you, I don’t think for one second that I can exhaust it, as it’s definitely something we’ll talk about more in the future. This is the type of subject that will preoccupy humans until there are no more humans. So, without further ado, here’s some basic info, a character sheet, if you will, for yours truly:
Poet, writer and creative director for an advertising agency in Eastern Europe (yes, you can go ahead and read the remaining of this text in a thick Eastern European accent)
Thanks to my job, I’ve amassed an enormous baggage of sometimes useless knowledge. I can tell you what adult diapers are made of, I can give you a very competent explanation of the Fermi Paradox and a few possible solutions to said paradox, I can bore you for hours with my obsession with alignment in AI and I know why cats purr
Expect this newsletter to reflect the previous point
I’ve read millions of books and I hope you did too
I’m impatient and am not a fan of disguising opinions as facts. I dislike zealots and will not engage in conversations with people that won’t even accept the idea that they might be wrong. Mirroring this fact, I will always change my opinion if new information makes it indefensible
I’ve got two wonderful kids. There’s at least one text on what being a parent does to a person in the future of this newsletter
Alright, enough about me. Back to the topic. I want you to imagine that an all powerful quantic computer was given this task: “Hello all powerful computer, here are all the letters of the alphabet. Combine them as you see fit until there are no more combinations possible”. This computer is, of course, just a machine, it’s an “it”. What will happen next is that this dumb machine will output a vast, almost impossible to imagine, collection of noise and gibberish. But in all that noise, this computer will also output every book ever written and every book that will ever be written until all the books in the universe have been written. Are those books, in the absence of authors, art? You can repeat the experiment with the visible spectrum and pixels, or with the building blocks of music until you exhaust all the known arts. The results will be the same. Those are certainly “products”, but something essential is missing, something denied by their very means of production. You can go ahead and call that something “soul” or “authenticity” or “feeling” or “agency”.
If it’s not the actual thing then what is it? Could it be the author herself? Think about your favorite book, or painting. The way it makes you feel, the way it moves you. How it reminds you of things long forgotten, or things you never knew you knew. Notice how the name of the author doesn’t matter. At all. It’s irrelevant, and the cliché is true: art has a life of its own, outside of its creator. The creator’s name or history are not important. Would you care if the Mona Lisa was painted by someone else? Does it matter that Moby Dick was written by Melville? Be honest with yourself.
Ok, so it’s not the fact that is has a particular author and it’s not the thing itself. If On the Road would have been spat out by a computer it wouldn’t have qualified. If it would have been Ginsberg instead of Kerouac on the cover, it wouldn’t have mattered. In order for that piece to be true art, there must be something else involved. What gives a piece of art value? What’s the things that glues all the elements into something better than the sum of its parts?
I’ve come to think that one of the most plausible answers is this: it’s the process. The seeking. The struggle. The toll it takes and the lessons that are internalized on this journey. The sweat, blood and tears along the way. The author’s name doesn’t matter, nor does the end of her journey, if the journey there is valueless. And the more I think about it, the more it rings true. Every author, regardless of art form, has to rip something from the soul and, like a mystical blacksmith, beat and heat and shape that thing into something else, paying dearly on the way.
And isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that struggle, in the end, the thing that gives value to our human lives as well? The striving, the yearning, the fingers on the cusp of grasping something greater than ourselves.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments section and, in the mean time, don’t forget to subscribe.