ON ‘EVERYTHING IS NOT ART, EVEN IF THE ARTIST SAYS SO’

Ancient Greek Sculpture

Before I begin, I must state my reasons for writing this. I find an increasing number of contradictions in the field of art pertaining to the question that what can be truly called as art and what cannot. Today there are no standards and the trend is that just about anything the artist says is supposed to be art and is to be accepted likewise.

This is the beginning of my journey aimed at bringing about a valid and coherent understanding of art and to give reasonable answers to such questions and clarify related contradictions. The aim of this article is to bring clarity in this matter and show where we have gone wrong and how we can correct it.

'The Fountain' by Marcel Duchamp

Today the situation in art is bad and it is further degrading, but the situation cannot be called unfortunate because the degradation did not come about by natural default but has resulted from wrong ideas and rationalizations which most of the artists, critics and intellectuals have been supporting, propagating and giving credence to since a very long time now. The condition has become quite deplorable but what exactly is wrong seems to be hidden from immediate logic. People mostly agree subconsciously if not consciously that something surely is wrong and something is definitely missing but one is not sure as to what it is that is wrong and why is it so. I will show here in exact terms what is wrong and what is missing and why the accepted conventional philosophy on art has become worthless and can no longer pave the way towards a worthy future.

The present day situation as I described above has directly resulted from abandonment and destruction of ‘reason’ in the field of art. This destruction has been brought about by destroying the meaning and the concept of ‘art’. The most effective way to destroy any concept is by inflating and expanding its meaning in such a way that the concept begins to mean ‘anything and everything’. The same has happened with art, initially art had a valid definition but today there is no definition because the concept has been raped and distorted by so called intellectuals and the result is there for all to see and witness i.e. the seemingly vivid yet wonderfully boring and chaotic art of today. Innocent people and new upcoming young artists have fallen victim to this anti-conceptual perspective and have taken to this by gulping down hook, line and sinker as did their predecessors. One of the villains who began to destroy the concept of art was Mr. Marcel Duchamp, I will tell about him later on in this article.

Sometimes breaking the convention to arrive at something new does not mean that you are on the right track and you are making worthy progress. This same is what happened within the field of art. Artists from the Dadaist movement  thought that by doing all sorts of crazy things they were reaching towards something worthy but actually they were not. The Dadaists prided themselves to be rule breakers and defiers of tradition but they could do only that and nothing else. Rule breaking is one thing but to arrive at something worthy is another and here they failed badly. Seen historically they seem to have been significant but not in the way one may think, they have been significant just like an error in time – Like the rise and fall of communism in Russia or as significant as Hitler in Germany or the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Meaning that they broke rules and revolted but could find anything better and worthy to replace the broken rules with. ‘Today’ is influenced by the past and the dreams of future but to understand ‘Today’ properly one must grasp the entire thing properly i.e. the forest, but it has to be grasped by looking at all the trees closely and then again from a distance to see the whole at once and all the while never losing one’s reason. Here one must first grasp what exactly is art and how it can be and should be defined and why.

So to recount all this I will begin at the beginning by stating one primary cause which affects everything done by man whether it is art or anything else. This primary cause is man’s perception i.e. his view of reality and his understanding of it. What does his perception depend upon? It depends on the Philosophy which man holds as true. Now what is ‘Philosophy’? Philosophy is a conceptual and comprehensive view of reality, it is like a map or a master key to understanding life and reality. A person cannot do without it, everyone must have some kind of philosophy. So philosophy is the precondition for everything we do including art and the nature of philosophy we hold true guides our actions in every possible way. 

So what is art? I think that art is nothing but reality ‘concretized’ according to the artist’s view and comprehension of reality. By reality I mean everything that exists. So what does an artist do? An artist understands the world i.e. reality based upon his reason and capacity and then he expresses his comprehension by recreating his view of reality in form of an artwork. The form of expression could be painting, music, literature or dance etc. But what one recreates always depends upon one’s view of reality and thus on philosophy one believes in.

For example look at Greeks what view of man did they project in their artworks. They portrayed men as Gods in their sculptures i.e. for them man was something very great and man held the highest status in their picture of reality. Contrasting with that now look at the works of artists of today, they display blank canvasses, urinate in galleries as performances, exhibit urinals, poop and rotting flesh as artworks and what not. The critics and the reviewers glorify all this using fancy language and faulty reasoning and they are successfully able to fool everyone making all believe that an empty chair or a plastic cow with fifteen udders is a piece of great artwork. They succeeded because that have destroyed the definition and concept first so they have a pseudo philosophy in which just about everything they proclaim to be art is art. One does not have to think long and hard to see the degradation and the nature of it once things are put into a proper objective perspective.

So in simple terms an artist creates an artwork depending upon how he sees and comprehends reality. But the artist sees and comprehends reality on the basis of the philosophy he or she holds true. But in truth reality is something that is independent of what one thinks about it so to have an accurate and valid picture of reality one must have a picture that is true, provable and non-contradictory. So to comprehend this true picture of reality one must have a correct philosophic system and it can only be possible if it is based on reason. But with an impaired and erroneous philosophy one will not have a true picture of reality and hence such an artist will recreate an erroneous and unworthy projection of reality in his or her artwork. Since art too is affected by philosophy then any change in one’s philosophy will affect one’s art and will reflect in it through various processes of which usually the artist is unaware but the change continues to manifest in the art. Between what is art and what is not, a number of intermediate levels exist which can be judged by the merit of the artwork.

An artwork must have a theme and subject matter if it has to be complete and remain in connection with reality. A said artwork lacking these two cannot be a valid artwork because an artwork has to be about something. If an artist says that his artwork is about nothing then he can never be proven right because to say the word ‘Nothing’ and to understand its meaning the artist must have had to refer to something even if in abstract and conceptual terms. One may not just escape it under any circumstance.

I will illustrate here by a famous case of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who called a ceramic urinal purchased from somewhere as his artwork. His justification being that he made the effort to choose and display it as an artwork and so this makes it an artwork by calling it ‘the fountain’ and it no further remains a mere urinal. It is transformed into a wonderful artwork just like that, Voila! And bravo too! But observe closely and ask how? Can one truly discern the ‘How’ in this, is it via reason and logic. No, of course not! The artwork contains neither a valid theme nor a subject. One would argue that the purported subject matter is the title ‘The fountain’, but is it so in reality. It is not, observe further that what it remains after so much thinking and fancy conceptualizing is still is a mere ordinary urinal and also that its true purpose for making the urinal was as utilitarian object, it was meant to be used as just a urinal. The artist tried to justify his artwork by categorizing it as ‘ready made’ sculpture. On the surface this idea may seems somewhat right but subconsciously it seems faulty and further deeper analysis will deem it worthless, let us see. Observe if the sculpture is ready made then it implies that the artist has not even made it but he has just played the role of a curator. Now a curator cannot be called an artist because he does not perform processes required to create art. So what I am arriving at is that even if Marcel Duchamp said that it was an artwork the truth is that it was not an artwork but a mere urinal because there is no way to justify it reasonably, the only way it can be justified is by using a irrational conceptual framework as Marcel Duchamp and other Dadaists constructed and fooled the world. Today the same kind of circus is going on in many places and a battalion of artists, curators, critics and intellectuals are doing their best to keep this circus running and many people of the world are falling easy prey to it but once all this is seen with an eye of reason then the circus doesn’t seem funny but disgusting. 

Many more examples exist today - plastic chairs, wielded utensils, broken and rusted tin boxes, crushed cars are called art. By what mental integrations does an artist connect a plastic chair with reality and deem it worthy of expression of something worthwhile. Imagine what would be the view of reality held by any such artists. Imagine what philosophy they must be holding as true and how much do they truly grasp the reality in which they live. Does it not indicate a breakdown of philosophy in some of those who ever had any and not to talk of the artists who never had any remotely coherent philosophy. Some of such artists are at the top, they have fooled everyone including maybe themselves never once questioning along their journey the nature of art and reality or what purpose does art serve or should serve. Such artists hold that art cannot be reasoned and it depends on merely the arbitrary whims and fancies of their fantastical imagining. Critics have tagged along such artists and they have developed together a seemingly sustainable yet unsustainable eco-system that does not show us life but death. The level of art has dropped to such dismal levels in many quarters that I wonder have they ever actually seen, felt and understood the works of Da-Vinci and Michelangelo.

The essential which I finally want to get across is that don’t fall prey to the prevalent conventional philosophy, hold reason as your best friend and dig deeper to arrive at the truth of the matter so that you can steer clear of such nonsense and reject it for good.

Thank You.