To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Friday, February 28, 2020
 
What Art thou?

I am fascinated with some paintings but don’t register much when I look at others. I consider myself quite a novice at appreciating this form of art. I couldn’t say why I like a particular painting or why I was indifferent to something else. Which makes me wonder what is it that makes one appreciate any kind of art form be it novels, poems, music, paintings… what is it? 
My usual analytical way of looking at things boils it down to two criteria: emotion and thought. It seems to me that the capacity of any piece of art form to engage me emotionally and intellectually and the extent to which it does both correlates to the effect it has on me. There is a complication here though that explains my inability to explain the effect when it comes to paintings. The ‘thought’ aspect has something to do with education in or cultivation of the particular art form…so that if I have grown up on a diet of literature then my ability to appreciate that particular form in an intellectual sense is heightened, or in other words, it’s an acquired appreciation. Emotions on the other hand can also be schooled but they may be impressed in one way or the other even when unschooled. I guess what I mean is that if you are educated in a particular art form the way it would emotionally impress upon you would also differ compared to if you weren’t educated in it so in that sense cultivation of the art form in the thought sense does elevate your appreciation of it in an emotional sense too…maybe elevate is not the right word because your emotions could very well be dulled the more you are exposed to a critical appreciation of a particular art form but your emotions would certainly be affected quite differently for the better or worse depending on your ability to intellectually engage with the object.

If I use this framework to analyse my own experience of different art forms: I would say that literature, prose and also poems to a lesser degree, engage me the most both intellectually and emotionally. This is the form that I would be able to voice very decided opinions about and also put my finger on why I do or do not appreciate it. Though obviously this doesn’t mean that I would be impressed by the same works that those who are equally schooled in this art form would be impressed by because of the additional complication that they might be schooled in completely different ways! I guess this explains what they mean by there’s no accounting for tastes.

The two other art forms I would consider here are music and paintings. I would think music has the capacity to impress me emotionally even though I am not formally schooled in it. To me why I love a piece of music has less to do with genre, artist, voice, lyrics, and so on and more to do with the emotional effect of the piece on me. I wouldn’t be able to put my finger on the reason why it impresses me but I could say in very definite terms that I appreciate or do not appreciate a piece of music because of the strong emotional effect it has on me. It’s unlikely, in fact rather impossible, that I would listen to something that doesn’t have that kind of effect on me, and sometimes when I am trapped into listening to some such pieces, such as being in a car with people who listen to what I would think is crappy music, it’s almost like I am not listening to music at all but just jarring or random noise.

This brings me to the last category, paintings. I think painting is a form that does not engage me emotionally in the same strong way that literature or music does. It doesn’t touch my deepest chords or soul so to speak. And it also does not impress on me intellectually like literature does. I have of course not cultivated this art form in any way. Strangely though, I am still struck by many pieces of art (not all, but then I am not struck by all pieces of music or literature either). I am not sure what part of me it engages; I don’t have any education in this art form so I have to assume it is the emotions? Again, like music, I can’t really pinpoint what it is that impresses me or does not impress me in the art. I would also say that the impact it has on my emotions, unlike music, is far mellower. I do not have any violent reactions to pieces of art that I appreciate or that I don’t appreciate, unlike music, which can make my soul go soaring. I might actually like art pieces that perhaps someone with a better education in art might think is bad art but that might be because this piece produces an emotional reaction in me however mellow without the technical details of the art itself, the colour, the lighting or whatever else counts for good/bad technique getting in the way of my appreciation. If I compare this to my appreciation of literature, I could never appreciate a novel if it was full of grammatical errors or described a scene in an amateurish way or had a cardboard character…it wouldn’t matter if the plot was great or story was interesting because I don’t read only for the plot or story; all the details that make it a work of literary art would matter to me. This is perhaps how it is for someone who is really schooled in painting as art form? The beauty to them goes deeper than the surface unlike for me in the same case…

This connects to something else I have been thinking about recently. I sometimes read contemporary poems when they pop in my way and I find that I am absolutely not touched by many or most of them, emotionally or intellectually. I ask myself why that might be and one of the reasons presenting to me now that I analyse it is that I am perhaps schooled to appreciate a completely different style of poetry. But if that’s the case, it goes back to the same question of how do I appreciate any piece of art? How do I know a good poem from one that I actually have no intellectual “taste” for (which means no emotional taste either because my intellectual tastes also modify my emotions)… I guess this then takes us to the broader or bigger question of whether any art form can be “objectively” appreciated at all or appreciated outside of the stylistic or cultivated taste of the one or ones who appreciate it. I would think not!

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 8:05 pm 0 comments
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