Ideas and Feelings vs. Bussiness

Is Art an Entertainment?

One musician having quite a successful band once said that the great happiness is when you are doing what you like to and earn money simultaneously. Because music and art in general is like politics - one can go there with the objective to defend interests of your electorate and country or to earn money only. And this is the basic difference between politicians and artists and businessmen in either area


By ANNA TKACH
from Kiev, UKRAINE


After visiting a couple of exhibitions of contemporary art and hearing that art is basically what an artist thinks art is I found myself in front of the question - what is art?

According to the dictionary definitions art is "the use of imagination and skill to express ideas or feelings, particularly in painting, drawing or sculpture" (oxford dictionary). The word "art" has Indo-European root and generally defines some sort of arrangement. So, accordingly, art expresses some idea, notion or concept, which should logically be primary in relation to the artwork, e.g. an artist creates a sculpture bearing some idea in mind and trying to reflect that idea in his/her creation, but not vice versa - after creating some object and idea is attached to it. So pseudo-philosophic mitigations about the sublime and unexplainable nature of artwork can, to my mind, be valid only in case we deal with the so-called art-therapy. Especially this refers to the conceptual art, which is so popular nowadays and which claims to reflect the postmodern principles and ideas, i.e. if an artist cannot explain the idea behind his/her work or engages into intricate and vague explanations that should mean either the weak lexicon of the creator or a banal fraud when a complicated form is nothing but...a mere complication.

I also find important to draw a difference between the major kinds of art according to their function and aims: applied art, commercial art and fine art. These, while being "arts" have absolutely different objectives and thus different impacts on the viewers/listeners. Aristotle defined fine art as art for art's sake which ultimate and only aim is to serve the aesthetic taste and create beauty, highlighting the fact that beauty is basically everything which is pleasant to look at. "Pleasure is the final cause of beauty and thus is not a means to another end, but an end in itself". But fine art except for the pure pleasure has another important function - communicating ideas, evoking strong emotions and other educational purposes, since aesthetics is considered to be educational means as well. Fine art is something that irrespective of the time of its creation bears immortal human values, deep thoughts, precious wisdom and has splits of soul of its creator.

The skill to produce things can however be more of practical significance and then it becomes an applied art or a craft, which aims mainly at the satisfaction of everyday needs and can be produced both by an individual and a machine. It of course lives up to the aesthetic tastes of the consumers but doesn't communicate any sublime or eternal ideas.

Finally, commercial art, i.e. art produced with commercial aim is, to my mind, not precisely the "pure" art. Of course, there have always been artworks, music and books produced on request, artists, of the past, however, like Michelangelo, Bach and Dostoyevsky who did produce some works by demand managed to convey either irony, fury or bitterness in this relation and still created vivid and unforgettable images. Realization that the pace of modern life is much faster than it was before sounds like a justification for the third (am not sure whether it is possible to say 10th class) class artworks we can observe today. Quite a lame justification though. Of course, it is much easier, cheaper and faster and the main thing - more profitable - to draw some doodles and call it a painting, to mould blindly some shapeless figure and call it a sculpture and to create songs, verse, lyrics in quantity 10 per day, call them music and sell them to the producers of the modern pop stars for whom there is no difference which song to sing, - much, much easier than to slave over the artwork or to attempt to find your truth and communicate it to the humanity. But is the easy way always the right one? What generation is growing on the pop commercial art? Does this sort of art have any aim except for earning money?

One musician having quite a successful punk-band once said that the great happiness is when you are doing what you like to and earn money simultaneously. Because music (and I think this can refer to art in general, too) is like politics - one can go there with the objective to defend interests of your electorate and country (to voice your ideas, to tell your truth, to show the way) or to earn money only. And this is the basic difference between politicians and artists and businessmen in either area.

Of course, commercial art has its right for existence as any sort of cheap and mid/low-quality entertainment which is meant to fulfill the function of a soporific tablet for one's mind, but it should declare self as the latter or as business merely not disguising self for art.

We all need rest and our mind as well, let's just make sure we do not sleep too long and still are able to discriminate art from business.