Art
Dec 2015
I went to an art gallery for the first time at the weekend. I’d heard a lot about them, and have seen lots of art on my mentor’s screen saver, but, having only recently been transformed into a human, this was the first time I’d seen any in the flesh, so to speak.
Having accompanied me to my first Open Mic night a few months ago, my mentor concluded that I’d take to the Arts quite well. He said he’d monitored my facial expressions during the performances, and what he saw was, in his words, ‘indicative of enjoyment and a degree of investment in the characters and storylines described.’
He was right. I had enjoyed the readings. One lady with a nice felt hat read out a story about a possum who was shunned by his fellow possums because his ex had spread a rumour that his great grandfather was a squirrel. The human members of the audience laughed because of the absurdity of it all; I was close to tears because I know what it’s like to be descended from a different species. Not many people know that I used to be a penguin, and my mentor and I agreed to keep it under wraps after he told one of his friends at the badminton club and she asked me if I’d ever been attacked by a polar bear (wrong Pole, knob head)!
Anyway, I digress. The art gallery was really fascinating. It housed a mixture of ‘traditional’ and modern art, and I happened to come across an assemblage of cocoa-dusted swing -ball sets labelled ‘A Moose.’
It didn’t look like a moose. It didn’t smell like a moose (well, in as far as I can imagine what a moose smells like). But from what I could gather, having looked at a fair number of installations on Saturday, the concept of art seems to cover both symbolism and replication, sometimes simultaneously. I find it surprising, therefore, that artists appear to come under scrutiny if they decide to channel one or the other; from what I’ve seen, producing an acrylic replica of a toad leaping its way through Leipzig should be no more worthy of the label ‘art’ than piling eight haystacks on top of each other and calling them ‘Leaping Toad in Leipzig.’
On Saturday, I noticed my mentor recoil at the examples of modern art on account of the fact that they didn’t – in his view – accurately portray that which they claimed to depict. And as a result, I started to wonder when and why humans became attached to the notion that art is synonymous with replication. I’ve only ever spent three hours in a gallery, and I can see that it isn’t.
According to my mentor, Aristotle said that humans take great pleasure in imitation. It satisfies the senses to see an exact replica of something, and it can be jarring to see something that was intended as an imitation but that didn’t quite come up to standard. This I can fully understand; in the gallery, I experienced that sinking feeling upon looking at a painting of a Sumatran tiger and finding its eyes to be too googly for the truth. I also marvelled at a portrait of a tribal leader and was left reeling at the news that it was not a photograph. As far as I see it, if an artist has intended to recreate a subject exactly, we are within our rights as onlookers – and indeed, as sentient beings – to demand that it be done well. Yet this is not the sole purpose of art, and I think that humans have lost sight of the concept of art – even traditional art – as a vessel for raising cryptic questions, challenging the onlooker and forcing them to deconstruct their own reality.
So I ask the question, why have humans come to regard art as impoverished if it fails to replicate something? Why has the absence of imitation in art come to connote a lack of talent? Perhaps the answer lies in a fundamental distrust of artists on the part of the masses, seeing them as pandering to the tastes of an elite whose needs and leanings are cryptic and, thus, suspect. As a result, perhaps many humans have come to favour technique over vision and imagination, negating art’s ability to raise fundamental questions, whatever its final arrangement.
In the UK, art galleries, for now, are free to enter. I couldn’t believe this when I found out! We therefore have a great deal of scope to both enjoy beauty and engage with broader, more complex mental processes, without having to pay to do so. I am learning that humans have a need for aesthetic pleasure – a quality found largely, though not exclusively, in an artist’s ability to successfully recreate something – but if this need is projected onto every work of art, all we’ll be left with is an ever increasing sense of disillusionment. Once that happens, they may as well cut all the funding streams that allow us access to art for free. Even if it is just a swing-ball moose.
Having accompanied me to my first Open Mic night a few months ago, my mentor concluded that I’d take to the Arts quite well. He said he’d monitored my facial expressions during the performances, and what he saw was, in his words, ‘indicative of enjoyment and a degree of investment in the characters and storylines described.’
He was right. I had enjoyed the readings. One lady with a nice felt hat read out a story about a possum who was shunned by his fellow possums because his ex had spread a rumour that his great grandfather was a squirrel. The human members of the audience laughed because of the absurdity of it all; I was close to tears because I know what it’s like to be descended from a different species. Not many people know that I used to be a penguin, and my mentor and I agreed to keep it under wraps after he told one of his friends at the badminton club and she asked me if I’d ever been attacked by a polar bear (wrong Pole, knob head)!
Anyway, I digress. The art gallery was really fascinating. It housed a mixture of ‘traditional’ and modern art, and I happened to come across an assemblage of cocoa-dusted swing -ball sets labelled ‘A Moose.’
It didn’t look like a moose. It didn’t smell like a moose (well, in as far as I can imagine what a moose smells like). But from what I could gather, having looked at a fair number of installations on Saturday, the concept of art seems to cover both symbolism and replication, sometimes simultaneously. I find it surprising, therefore, that artists appear to come under scrutiny if they decide to channel one or the other; from what I’ve seen, producing an acrylic replica of a toad leaping its way through Leipzig should be no more worthy of the label ‘art’ than piling eight haystacks on top of each other and calling them ‘Leaping Toad in Leipzig.’
On Saturday, I noticed my mentor recoil at the examples of modern art on account of the fact that they didn’t – in his view – accurately portray that which they claimed to depict. And as a result, I started to wonder when and why humans became attached to the notion that art is synonymous with replication. I’ve only ever spent three hours in a gallery, and I can see that it isn’t.
According to my mentor, Aristotle said that humans take great pleasure in imitation. It satisfies the senses to see an exact replica of something, and it can be jarring to see something that was intended as an imitation but that didn’t quite come up to standard. This I can fully understand; in the gallery, I experienced that sinking feeling upon looking at a painting of a Sumatran tiger and finding its eyes to be too googly for the truth. I also marvelled at a portrait of a tribal leader and was left reeling at the news that it was not a photograph. As far as I see it, if an artist has intended to recreate a subject exactly, we are within our rights as onlookers – and indeed, as sentient beings – to demand that it be done well. Yet this is not the sole purpose of art, and I think that humans have lost sight of the concept of art – even traditional art – as a vessel for raising cryptic questions, challenging the onlooker and forcing them to deconstruct their own reality.
So I ask the question, why have humans come to regard art as impoverished if it fails to replicate something? Why has the absence of imitation in art come to connote a lack of talent? Perhaps the answer lies in a fundamental distrust of artists on the part of the masses, seeing them as pandering to the tastes of an elite whose needs and leanings are cryptic and, thus, suspect. As a result, perhaps many humans have come to favour technique over vision and imagination, negating art’s ability to raise fundamental questions, whatever its final arrangement.
In the UK, art galleries, for now, are free to enter. I couldn’t believe this when I found out! We therefore have a great deal of scope to both enjoy beauty and engage with broader, more complex mental processes, without having to pay to do so. I am learning that humans have a need for aesthetic pleasure – a quality found largely, though not exclusively, in an artist’s ability to successfully recreate something – but if this need is projected onto every work of art, all we’ll be left with is an ever increasing sense of disillusionment. Once that happens, they may as well cut all the funding streams that allow us access to art for free. Even if it is just a swing-ball moose.
EX PENGUIN
Photo credit: Retrato de Picasso de Juan Gris, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso#/media/File:JuanGris.Portrait_of_Picasso.jpg