Art - Why We Create

[Bill Wiltrack]

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We're just trying to make it through.

Somehow, by a quirk of nature, we have been gleamed with a small sliver of consciousness.

Not enough consciousness to change anything but just enough consciousness to be able to realize our own eventual death.

And somehow we hope that this will give us meaning...but it won't.

We create art in hoping to make the world a different place, a more kind place. But art cannot do that.

Nothing can help us.





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[WanderingLands]

I think you should try it at least, as it actually does help - one of the benefits being therapeutic and to articulate your emotions.

[Bill Wiltrack]

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Art does distract us. Takes our mind off of the horror that we call life.

But, there are times where art becomes useless against the anguish, the emptiness of our situation.

The emotion of fear paralyze us. The raw fear becomes our art. Real art.

That is the only emotion I feel right now...



Am I in art? The art of my life?


Is this what I created?




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[GreatandWiseTrixie]

Chimpanzees hammering brushes on paper and putting on pedastals for the other apes to gawk at.

Then they have circles where they debate with and 'educate' other chimpanzees and put lots of fancy words around it as a cloak to disguise and distract from the base nature of it, the chimpanzee dance.

[van Keister]

O great and unwise Trixie, I take it you have never been in an art gallery to have experienced the wonder of let us say a Rembrandt. Art defies logic in that it cannot be reduced in a nutshell. I could give you all the proverbial reasons like "art tries to capture the measureless" or "art labors to define Beauty as such" but simply to me being a student of Gainsborough and Romney's paintings all my life, to see their individual brushstrokes is an identity that transcends everything else. It says, "I was here, this is my work" something indescribably human and that is the reason why we paint.

[hammock]

. We're just trying to make it through. Somehow, by a quirk of nature, we have been gleamed with a small sliver of consciousness. Not enough consciousness to change anything but just enough consciousness to be able to realize our own eventual death. And somehow we hope that this will give us meaning...but it won't. We create art in hoping to make the world a different place, a more kind place. But art cannot do that. Nothing can help us.

Not even an appeal to "The song never ends" of eternalism? Come on, Bill, don't pretend that you suddenly got filled with the holy ghost of Joe Mundane, either his street-practical or enhanced academic-practical version. IOW, sounds like typical conclusions springing from a presentism-grounded perspective of time that the gardener lady faithfully and unthinkingly adheres to. Or which Zobo the self-conflicting scientism hobo can't wean himself from: "I trust physics to reveal the true nature of things. Except when they clash with commonsense or traditional beliefs. Uh, which I guess is about every other damn instance."

Our senses tell us that time flows: namely, that the past is fixed, the future undetermined, and reality lived in the present. Yet various physical and philosophical arguments suggest otherwise. The passage of time is probably an illusion. Consciousness may involve thermodynamic or quantum processes that lend the impression of living moment by moment. [THAT MYSTERIOUS FLOW, SciAm, September 2002]

There certainly shouldn't be a passage of time or determination of spatial location in the utter absence which conventional, non-neurobiological and non-conscious existence sports (i.e., death). Combine that with the supposed persistence of your body's worldline, regardless of your cognition convincing you that you solely exist as just the one part of it represented by this specious "now" word. With no clock ticking or mental judgment available of passage transpiring any longer, your continuance would be virtually gapless, with no rewind necessary to your first fetal experiences. Since you're already immediately "at" that original atemporal / aspatial starting-point after entering death. Or IOW, that homogeneous oblivion which an emerging awareness arose from during the womb phase.

It would just be the same life you've already had, not a rewind and rerun of it. Even if the latter could be the case, it would require survival of memory from the version of you which died to even make the judgement, at a younger age, after a rewind, that "Oh, I'm repeating my life again, that sequence of events from birth to death that happened before". There would be no "it happened before and again and again". The spaceless, timeless, not-even-nothingness that gobbles you up after death is the same spaceless, timeless, not-even-nothingness that you emerged from as the fetal brain wired itself up into activity.

The usage of "original" in a paragraph above might suggest some kind of do-over, but these are inefficient artifacts falling out of an everyday language not designed to deal with death's elimination of the psychological space/time forms that regulated consciousness while alive. Which thereby allows death's type of non-conscious existence (which most of the rest of the universe resides in) to be such a disappearance of everything. [Much aided by panpsychism being declared infamous, or disparaged by most materialists; perceptions and experiences (and understanding of them) don't fall out of the simple relations or superficial contacts between objects like a direct or commonsense realist might celebrate.]

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

O great and unwise Trixie, I take it you have never been in an art gallery to have experienced the wonder of let us say a Rembrandt. Art defies logic in that it cannot be reduced in a nutshell. I could give you all the proverbial reasons like "art tries to capture the measureless" or "art labors to define Beauty as such" but simply to me being a student of Gainsborough and Romney's paintings all my life, to see their individual brushstrokes is an identity that transcends everything else. It says, "I was here, this is my work" something indescribably human and that is the reason why we paint.

Never been to an art gallery? What a stupid and ignorant post.

I go to art galleries more than once a week, on average. Most of the critics I work with don't even understand the meaning of masterpiece.

Most of the ones they pick for the gallery are simply "chimps hitting on brushes, pretty colors."

It can't be reduced because theres nothing to reduce it to.

[ncrbrts]

All "art" is self indulgent. It is intended for the creator to impose their ideas onto other people - whether those other people believe it to be beautiful, ugly or somewhere in between.

We create to bring the tiny pockets of space time in which we exist to the attention of the masses. It is faux-intellect. You can basically throw faeces onto a canvas, explain it as self expression, henceforth it becomes art. The same can be said of music, drama and literature.

[van Keister]

I agree with you that the majority of art in all forms is self-indulgent expression designed to appeal to the masses; but there is a tiny portion of art per se that is devoted to the highest expression of man and that being art for art's sake. And it is here that you must look for find Beauty itself something indefinable that transcends the palette and even our conceptions of art itself.

[attofishpi]

Art - Why We Create?

..for the same reason IT created..

[Pluto]

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We're just trying to make it through.

Somehow, by a quirk of nature, we have been gleamed with a small sliver of consciousness.

Not enough consciousness to change anything but just enough consciousness to be able to realize our own eventual death.

And somehow we hope that this will give us meaning...but it won't.

We create art in hoping to make the world a different place, a more kind place. But art cannot do that.

Nothing can help us.





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Art does a lot of things, one thing it can do is create meaning. It can create meaning in an unfathomable world. The first hurdle is what to paint, or what to make. Start with something that you want to see that is not currently in the world, or at least within your immediate surroundings. Create art as a medicine for the ills of the world. Paint those in power naked and on the toilet.

[ncrbrts]

Create art as a medicine for the ills of the world. Paint those in power naked and on the toilet.

To what end? All art is created to make the artist feel better about themselves and their universe. That it can reach an insignificant few is irrelevant, although it might be the aim of those who create art as a way of earning money on which to survive. It is primarily created for the artists' sake, theirs and only theirs.

I speak having spent many years training as a musician before abandoning that particular art form. I wrote music to satisfy myself in the first part but, because I had no confidence in anything I created, I destroyed everything. I now only play when I am alone, when I am sure that no one will hear. I do not wish to burden my creativity on anyone else.

[Pluto]

Create art as a medicine for the ills of the world. Paint those in power naked and on the toilet.

To what end? All art is created to make the artist feel better about themselves and their universe. That it can reach an insignificant few is irrelevant, although it might be the aim of those who create art as a way of earning money on which to survive. It is primarily created for the artists' sake, theirs and only theirs.

I speak having spent many years training as a musician before abandoning that particular art form. I wrote music to satisfy myself in the first part but, because I had no confidence in anything I created, I destroyed everything. I now only play when I am alone, when I am sure that no one will hear. I do not wish to burden my creativity on anyone else.

Okay, your second paragraph is the answer to your first. If I were the only human I would not make art, I would do something else. Making art and bringing it into the world to be seen by others is fundamental to art. When I make something I think about the person who will look at it.