Would you mind saying more about "Encouraging us against locating our own taste in the context of our influences is the opposite of what I needed from art school. No one is an island, and nothing is ever 'just pretty'"? It's most intriguing.
Sure, thanks for asking! So, if you are making art to pursue beauty, you inevitably wind up making some judgement calls about what beauty even is. There are lots of Renaissance paintings of beautiful women, for instance, but everything from the shape of their body to the shape of their hairline to the tone of their skin is different depending on where and when the painting was made. Even painting something in the abstract, pure colors evoke associations with meanings from the culture (like the ol' red white and blue, right?)
So like (picking a random abstract artist) Mondrian painted geometric forms because he was trying to convey a spiritual kind of beauty, which he thought depictions of the natural world could not express. He was a big deal because this was basically the opposite of all the prior artists who had tried to evoke divine beauty through depictions of saints, the nude human figure, scenes from nature, etc etc. So his idea of beauty-- and the way that other people picked up on it as innovating on ideas of what makes for a beautiful painting-- was strongly reactive to the art and culture and history around him. And the same is true for just about any artist you can think of, including artists who do not prioritize beauty-- every artist, every artwork, is situated in a certain place and time which gives it contextual meaning, whether they're going along with trends or iterating on them or running in some opposite direction. I brought up Thomas Kincaid because he is a guy praised by people who think of his art as Obviously Beautiful, to the point that they do think about *why* they take for granted that "beauty" = a thousand paintings of glowing rustic single-family cottages with no human beings in sight. But to many people, that exact same image carries sinister undertones of isolation from the rest of society, disavowal of the "ugliness" of having to live with people who are different from you, and the polite veneer of beautiful homes where horrible things happen behind closed doors. When a certain kind of beauty is taken for granted, it stops being read as a meaningful or intentional choice.
When you approach art as just pure self-expression, you are encouraged to just kind of ignore that context when it comes to your own work. You wind up seeing your own work as unmoored from the artistic conversations around you, meaning nothing more than "this is what I like." (I think of the many many many many people who crank out illustrations of cute anime ladies in breezy little sweaters that basically say nothing about why that particular image is the first and only thing they think to draw over and over.) I was pretty harsh on it in this essay, I've kind of softened on it-- I don't think it's a bad thing to make art intuitively and think about what it means later-- but I think ignoring that context intentionally is, at best, leaving money on the table. Looking at what your own ideas of beauty might mean and where they came from-- what cultural or personal context might have influenced you to think that X is more appealing to make or look at than Y-- is such a rich vein for guiding your creative impulses in more interesting directions, figuring out what you bring to the table that no one else can, how your work fits into the great ongoing conversation that is Art.
If I understand you well you’re gesturing to the fact that every movement — art and otherwise — is a response to something else. I’m not an art historian, but I know that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was explicit about their goals as a response to the dominant forces of the day. You're describing some folk who approach art in a way that, at best, lacks intentionality and perhaps they've shorn of any context. I met an aspiring poet once who said she didn't read other poets because she didn't want anyone to influence her. She exiled herself to a private island because everyone else threatened her self-expression.
Your explanation makes me think of Bo Burnham working with the tension between how so much has become vapid and performative and the fact that he got famous by doing exactly that. It must be doubly frustrating for a visual artist like you to see a archipelago of un-intentioned images growing beyond the horizon. As someone who fell madly in love with words from the moment I heard my mother voice I mourn our slide into a post-literate society in favour of rampaging images. I'm glad to receive reminders like yours that there's a visual literacy at stake as well. I mean, are we so bigoted in our chronocentrism that we believe we don't stand on the shoulders of those who came before us? That we don't need to be in conversation with them?
I wonder how this fits into your observations about how folk handle critique of their artistic endeavours. You’ve got your hands in fertile ground, friend Jesse. As someone who leans sociological I’m excited to see what glittering fleck you pull out next.
Anyway, all hail the machine-generated future of content'n'stuff..?
The self-critical aspiring screenwriter who’s worrying about “the job” of it all, currently typing on this keyboard, can’t begin to express how close to home this essay hit, man. Ugh. Thank you💚
I went to Pentecostal church between the ages of maybe 13 and 16, after going to live with my father and his 2nd wife and family in Eastern Kentucky. It was definitely a world unto itself. There was plenty of speaking in tongues and ecstatic states. I witnessed a pastor run across the back of the pews at a gallop with his eyes closed. The whole thing was pretty surreal. The church was the center of those people’s lives for generations back, and I could see how escaping would be hard.
Would you mind saying more about "Encouraging us against locating our own taste in the context of our influences is the opposite of what I needed from art school. No one is an island, and nothing is ever 'just pretty'"? It's most intriguing.
Sure, thanks for asking! So, if you are making art to pursue beauty, you inevitably wind up making some judgement calls about what beauty even is. There are lots of Renaissance paintings of beautiful women, for instance, but everything from the shape of their body to the shape of their hairline to the tone of their skin is different depending on where and when the painting was made. Even painting something in the abstract, pure colors evoke associations with meanings from the culture (like the ol' red white and blue, right?)
So like (picking a random abstract artist) Mondrian painted geometric forms because he was trying to convey a spiritual kind of beauty, which he thought depictions of the natural world could not express. He was a big deal because this was basically the opposite of all the prior artists who had tried to evoke divine beauty through depictions of saints, the nude human figure, scenes from nature, etc etc. So his idea of beauty-- and the way that other people picked up on it as innovating on ideas of what makes for a beautiful painting-- was strongly reactive to the art and culture and history around him. And the same is true for just about any artist you can think of, including artists who do not prioritize beauty-- every artist, every artwork, is situated in a certain place and time which gives it contextual meaning, whether they're going along with trends or iterating on them or running in some opposite direction. I brought up Thomas Kincaid because he is a guy praised by people who think of his art as Obviously Beautiful, to the point that they do think about *why* they take for granted that "beauty" = a thousand paintings of glowing rustic single-family cottages with no human beings in sight. But to many people, that exact same image carries sinister undertones of isolation from the rest of society, disavowal of the "ugliness" of having to live with people who are different from you, and the polite veneer of beautiful homes where horrible things happen behind closed doors. When a certain kind of beauty is taken for granted, it stops being read as a meaningful or intentional choice.
When you approach art as just pure self-expression, you are encouraged to just kind of ignore that context when it comes to your own work. You wind up seeing your own work as unmoored from the artistic conversations around you, meaning nothing more than "this is what I like." (I think of the many many many many people who crank out illustrations of cute anime ladies in breezy little sweaters that basically say nothing about why that particular image is the first and only thing they think to draw over and over.) I was pretty harsh on it in this essay, I've kind of softened on it-- I don't think it's a bad thing to make art intuitively and think about what it means later-- but I think ignoring that context intentionally is, at best, leaving money on the table. Looking at what your own ideas of beauty might mean and where they came from-- what cultural or personal context might have influenced you to think that X is more appealing to make or look at than Y-- is such a rich vein for guiding your creative impulses in more interesting directions, figuring out what you bring to the table that no one else can, how your work fits into the great ongoing conversation that is Art.
If I understand you well you’re gesturing to the fact that every movement — art and otherwise — is a response to something else. I’m not an art historian, but I know that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was explicit about their goals as a response to the dominant forces of the day. You're describing some folk who approach art in a way that, at best, lacks intentionality and perhaps they've shorn of any context. I met an aspiring poet once who said she didn't read other poets because she didn't want anyone to influence her. She exiled herself to a private island because everyone else threatened her self-expression.
Your explanation makes me think of Bo Burnham working with the tension between how so much has become vapid and performative and the fact that he got famous by doing exactly that. It must be doubly frustrating for a visual artist like you to see a archipelago of un-intentioned images growing beyond the horizon. As someone who fell madly in love with words from the moment I heard my mother voice I mourn our slide into a post-literate society in favour of rampaging images. I'm glad to receive reminders like yours that there's a visual literacy at stake as well. I mean, are we so bigoted in our chronocentrism that we believe we don't stand on the shoulders of those who came before us? That we don't need to be in conversation with them?
I wonder how this fits into your observations about how folk handle critique of their artistic endeavours. You’ve got your hands in fertile ground, friend Jesse. As someone who leans sociological I’m excited to see what glittering fleck you pull out next.
Anyway, all hail the machine-generated future of content'n'stuff..?
The self-critical aspiring screenwriter who’s worrying about “the job” of it all, currently typing on this keyboard, can’t begin to express how close to home this essay hit, man. Ugh. Thank you💚
I went to Pentecostal church between the ages of maybe 13 and 16, after going to live with my father and his 2nd wife and family in Eastern Kentucky. It was definitely a world unto itself. There was plenty of speaking in tongues and ecstatic states. I witnessed a pastor run across the back of the pews at a gallop with his eyes closed. The whole thing was pretty surreal. The church was the center of those people’s lives for generations back, and I could see how escaping would be hard.