Musing on Art, Celebrities and Reality. - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Discuss literary and artistic creations, or post your own poetry, essays etc.
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#14956872
When I was young (and for some time after that) I won several writing and a few other kinds of artistic contests. I seriously considered trying to become a professional artist more than once. However, I would routinely come up against a certain kind of problem. Namely, I realized that I was doing art because I wished that certain things were real and to merely depict those things instead of making them real was not going to satisfy me in the long run.

So, it wasn't ultimately satisfying for me to write stories where a man goes to strange dimensions, has sex with green women and sword fights with some giant ugly dude. Instead I ended up going to China and doing fencing. I guess this was as close as I could get.

When we look at celebrities and professional artists, it's shocking how many of them seem to be severely depressed, or how they get into drugs or other unfortunate things. I was wondering tonight if perhaps they aren't experiencing something similar to what I've experienced, only they went down the path I didn't go down. When someone acts in a movie and pretends to be a fighter pilot or the president, they are doing that because those things have value; you almost never seen movies where actors are pretending to be actors and when you do, it appears to be some kind of commentary or artistic experiment and not a literal depiction of those people's lives.

So here is what I found myself wondering. When an actor, a writer or an artist portrays a fighter pilot or a president, somewhere deep inside of himself, did he want that kind of person to exist in reality or perhaps even, did he want to literally be a fighter pilot or the president? So many of those artists seem to be insane. They put on so many hats, pretend to be so many things and yet beneath it all is the knowledge that they are none of those things. It begins to seem clear to me why so many of them get depressed. If someone can be truly happy being an artist then I think, do it but I think that there are people out there who conflate fantasy with reality and go down the wrong road.

If I were to attempt to talk about metaphysical ideas, maybe we all come here thinking that we want something to be real and not just the dreaming of some God. When we move towards making that thing real we are happy and when we fail, we are unhappy and if we create nothing but an illusion inside of a bubble, it merely postpones our unhappiness.
#14989505
If you want to be an artist or a writer who doesn't merely shed your sickness in books or on canvasses, you need to approach what you are doing by extinguishing yourself as a personality and becoming the energy that motivates what you are depicting or creating in words.

There are a lot of nutjobs and opportunists masquerading as artists and writers, I agree with you. They should really not be given the status they tend to have in our time. They are not like Van Gogh or Edgar Allen Poe. They are, to me, just hollow wankers who don't really have the faintest idea what they are doing or why they are doing it.

To create something you have to plan it by thinking about it, contemplating it, and then let your experience and capability guide you to the surprise that will ensue. And it is often a surprise as many creations in both paint or words do not turn out the way the mind envisages them at first. When the mind, the hand, the eye and the experience, memory and inspiration come together, a work ensues that is a thing unto itself, a Ding an Sich, a work of art. The maker is there but not there. The work speaks for itself and in its own space and therefore has longevity and, if well made, it will also have enough value to intrigue people forever. If it is just there but has little to say then it fails in the context of art although it may succeed as a statement of protest or anti-social rage in a particular time period. If that period isn't very long then that work will need more to sustain it.

An unmade bed, a cow in formaldehyde, a vagina gawping at the world while its owner cringes behind its tragically exploited bloom, a canvas full of angry, juvenile squiggles will not outlast the tendency to shock or disgust the true seeker of meaning in art or writing. Art just needs more. Most people just demand less.
#14989522
Dandelion wrote:If you want to be an artist or a writer who doesn't merely shed your sickness in books or on canvasses, you need to approach what you are doing by extinguishing yourself as a personality and becoming the energy that motivates what you are depicting or creating in words.

There are a lot of nutjobs and opportunists masquerading as artists and writers, I agree with you. They should really not be given the status they tend to have in our time. They are not like Van Gogh or Edgar Allen Poe. They are, to me, just hollow wankers who don't really have the faintest idea what they are doing or why they are doing it.

To create something you have to plan it by thinking about it, contemplating it, and then let your experience and capability guide you to the surprise that will ensue. And it is often a surprise as many creations in both paint or words do not turn out the way the mind envisages them at first. When the mind, the hand, the eye and the experience, memory and inspiration come together, a work ensues that is a thing unto itself, a Ding an Sich, a work of art. The maker is there but not there. The work speaks for itself and in its own space and therefore has longevity and, if well made, it will also have enough value to intrigue people forever. If it is just there but has little to say then it fails in the context of art although it may succeed as a statement of protest or anti-social rage in a particular time period. If that period isn't very long then that work will need more to sustain it.

An unmade bed, a cow in formaldehyde, a vagina gawping at the world while its owner cringes behind its tragically exploited bloom, a canvas full of angry, juvenile squiggles will not outlast the tendency to shock or disgust the true seeker of meaning in art or writing. Art just needs more. Most people just demand less.

Thanks for your well-written response to my old post!
#14992285
I think if I were to try and put it succinctly, art for art's sake means to draw something because you want that thing to exist as a drawing.

Maybe this is obvious but I feel like there's a fine, almost difficult to perceive line between drawing something because you want that thing and drawing it because you want that drawing to exist in of itself.
#15005260
In some Islamic traditions you aren't allowed to draw living objects. This is why things like geometric art are often associated with Islam; it's not the art itself that is banned but the depiction of a living object is banned. It apparently has something to do with cheapening or trying to rival God's creation.

My personal impression is that all art, including impressionistic art, is (1) presumed to be inferior and so you'd have to be a fool to try and "challenge" the real thing, which is not the mentality that most artists have and (2) all artistic depictions of real things stem from something that really exists, at which point they are basically an extension of or a part of creation; it is ironically only when you try to make something artistic that is, for example, a repeating geometric pattern that you are actually creating something which may not otherwise be found in creation. In some ways, this is arguably more disrespectful than making a depiction of something else, presuming of course that your depiction is not made to be an insult.

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