ArtBistro

“I will not say if this is art or not art.



 

What I just said is art.



 

This is not art.”

 

-R. Fiskewold

 

            I do not suppose that this is much of what I call art. However, I will attempt to briefly illustrate the tautology that underlies the concept of art. We tend to read and discuss art as proper name and approach it from a multitude of disciplines, all for the sole purpose of a somewhat cyclical journey that finds us at the same place yet exposed and aware to many things along the way.

            I would summarize this journey of sorts by posing the generic question, “What is art?” I have come to think of art as a dichotomy of disciplines focused in two inherently different concerns: formalism and conceptualism. I would describe formalism as: a traditional viewpoint that establishes art as a science, embodying various elements of worldly knowledge through its production. Contrarily, I would describe conceptualism as: closely related to “art for art’s sake”, alleviating the artist from certain binds of formalism, and proposes the argument for the “art is whatever” contingency, a discipline that is more concerned with the thought, theory and philosophy of art. The concern of the traditional skills of the artist has been somewhat diluted throughout the course of modernity and it is this for which I could proclaim objection but for now will resist.

            Instead I will commend modernity, (the avant-garde, modernism, post-modernism and all the other caches of art style that presumably continue to have someone manning the flag; whether an iconic work of art or a tribunal of critics and artist-critics and critic-artists) and say that for any harm done to art it has equally breathed the breath of life back into it. These various “incidences”, or movements, of the art world serve as brave hands to shift the wood and stoke up the fire, make mountains out of molehills only to claim later that the mountain was never a mountain and the fire’s been out for days. This psycho-lucid train of thought has been at the source of art's mainstay since the beginning of time yet it has always seemed to elude the concern of the artist.  It is this self-serving and self-deprecating behavior of the artist that makes defining art obsolete in and of itself.

            The pretense of human beings to ever completely understand anything is absurd. But as humans grow into their understanding of being humans, so shall art grow into its understanding of being art. We are only obligated to remember where we were and where we are now, and to know that we will be there once again, re-interpreting, re-transmitting and re-translating what we may or may not call art.

            This is not art. That was.