You bring up an interesting question that many artists have been trying to answer throughout the last century, to no avail.
In that question of yours resides a touchy problem that can not be left unmentioned. In order to fully understand the meaning of your question though, one would have to understand the historical baggage, what it was, and how it shaped today's perception of art.
Probably the most disturbing phenomenon in the art of the current century, a result of the dislocation in the dualism of art and science, is the profoundly pervasive indifference of the whole contemporary generation of artists to formulate a clear-cut definition of art itself. The obscurantism, the evasive arguments and denials, the lack of any direct, forthright statement, is evidence of a deep-going crisis in art. With the exception of a few scholars, nowhere in the field of art has there appeared a challenging assertion to say what art is in our time.
In the social arena of modern living, the most engaging diversion is the extensive practice of generalized and personal analysis. Because we live in a technical-scientific-analytical age of calculating machines and statistical truths, we respond to the powerful pressures of analytical behavior...to define, to clarify, to identify. It is a great game of dissection and decortication of the underlying mechanisms in every segment of the social structure, from psychoanalysis to social surgery. We practice the analytical game everywhere except in the fine arts. Here, in the arts, the emotional fog rolls in, intellectual inertia overtakes us, and the cultural swamp remains undefined, unexplored. Words like
style and
taste have no clear meaning except, perhaps, in commercial usage. And the special caste terminology -
feeling, intuition, inspiration, perception, creativity - are ritualistic ceremonial expressions of artists, undefined by simple definitions except in the laboratories of clinical psychologists.
The special word
art is a sacred temple, a mysterious inner sanctum of artistic pursuit, where magical intellectual powers interact with primordial outpourings of the irrational subconscious. To put it bluntly, when art terminology has lost its power to convey sense, idea, or meaning of art expression, then the artist, the art field, the whole cultural endeavor, is conflicted, confused, and disoriented. It becomes a chaotic wasteland, a lost continent of the culture.
The net result has been to let loose a carnival of art dilettantism and trendy art sophistication concealed behind an imposing front of synthetic rhetoric, easthetic lyricism, and emotional triteness.
The state of art today is such that it can now be performed by abecedarians and amateurs with virtually no study, preparation, or training. In galleries and exhibitions, the amateur esthete can now compete on equal terms with the seasoned, knowledgeable master with such facility that hardly anyone, frequently not even art connoisseurs and critics, can tell good art from bad art, amateur art from professional art. When the quest for brevity and simplicity has been reduced to infantile primitivism, we have lost the validity of concepts. When the creative urge to reveal life has been distorted into a wayward surge of undirected energy, we have lost control of direction and experimentation. When the search for clarity and order has been diverted to piecing out a meaningless jargon of amateur misbehavior, we have lost our artistic heritage. When the need for definitions, standards, and criteria has been seduced by vacuous emotional mumblings, we have seen the perversion of the philosophy of art and aesthetics. When the artist has surrendered his status, his authority, his principles, his professionalism, then the amateur has taken over, and the jungle is upon us.
The problem of the amateur in art is really the problem of the artist in society. To say that the amateur has invaded the arts, and that the fine arts are becoming an amateur art, is to say that the artist has defaulted in his obligation to the social environment. But this view alone does not face the issue squarely, for it would force the conclusion that the artist alone is responsible for the neglect and deterioration of art. To say that the artist has rejected the norms of living, has removed himself from society, has turned away from reality to promote his inner personal image of life and art-for-art's sake isolationism, is to say the exile prefers the desert, the suicide enjoys cutting his veins, the tortured man relishes his anguished cries for help. In truth, these are but the pathetic attempts of the withered, truncated man to become a whole man. The issue at hand is really a dual problem: it is not only the artist's inbreeding and involution, it is also society's forced alienation and neglect of the artist. If there is a crisis in art, a disintegration of its moral fiber, a decay of its historical precepts and philosophical virtues, it is because society
first has disavowed and disabled it as an intellectual ressource, a cultural necessity, a social and educative force. It has refused its permission to be integrated with the technological, scientific advances in our time, except as a utilitarian, commercial, accessory art. To engage a solution on this basis needs a moral reawakening of society and a conceptual reworking of art.
The reestablishement of self-control in the artist and social respect for art devolves on creating again a new dualism of art and science in the twenty-first century. The obscure terminology must be clarified and attached to commonly shared associations. Personal values must be defined according to generalized experience. The personal subjective purpose must be widened to embrace the broader social goal. The immediate and urgent necessity, the first order of the day, is to redefine the old word
art. The clichés, the nonsense, must be stripped-off. Art must have a new interpretation, infused with new meanings and values, in order to find its equal place with other positive cultural pursuits in our time. It must mean as much to the people as medicine, surgery, bacteriology... or physics, engineering, architecture... or steak, mashed potatoes, apple pie. It must be executed so ably and understood so well that it will stand strong and firm as a skyscrapper does when it is done well... or it will collapse in ruins when it is not. Art must be refined into a critical intellectual tool to meet these challenges. New cutting edges must be given to the old "saw", fine-honed and sharp, diamond-hard and tough, to stand up under the friction and abrasion of life. To be "art", it should be made responsible for communication of its ideas and concepts. It should reflect the life and times of the artist, his integrity, his ethics, his democratic ideals in the progress of man. It should show his developed skill and judgment in projecting significant, expressive from. It should reveal invention and originality in transmitting the aesthetic experience. And, above all, it should arise out of the environment, the social-human-scientific culture base as the controlling factor in its creation.
This does not mean that strictures or rigid conventions must be placed on the artist. Nor does it say that experimentation or freedom in personal expression should be curbed or annulled. Nor does it propose that there is only one way of seeing the world around us, one outlook, one style or method of approach. It does not ask the artist to obey or be subservient to any fixed rule, regulation, dogma, or tradition. It does not set up absolutes of authority, or impose conditioned reflexes of conformism. However, it does ask the artist to respect and rely on the positive norms, values, and traditions that still operate and still function in the study and preparation of the artist, that still apply in the cultural background of modern art creation. These should be seen as the educative resource, the imperative precondition for the survival and growth of art.
Socrates, we are told, attempting to probe into the nature of law, speaks of the laws of men as a response to the social pressures that arise out of human conditions in the natural environment. And therefore, he argues with penetrating insight, to understand that nature of law we must first understand the law of nature. The liberating principle of art lies precisely here, in the Socratic approach to the conjoined relationship of two mutually attracted, interacting forces, man and nature, nature and man. This synergistic principle, if we can refer to it as such, argues for a relationship of ideas, in Toynbee's words , in a context of challenge and response, response and challenge.
(
http://www.cooperativeindividualism...._response.html)
It seizes upon diverse attitudes of thoughts, probing for intrinsic attributes of contraction and expansion, refinement and extension. It enlarges the field of intellectual vision, and refines the area of critical judgment. It tends to limit subjective bias and mental myopia.
If we apply the principle to one of the central problems of art, the presence of the amateur in the fine arts, we might uncover these provocative correlations: To understand the amateur of art, we must first understand the art of the amateur... To recognize the professional of art, we must recognize the art of the professional. To explain the presence of the amateur in professional art, we must explain the presence of the professional in amateur art. Suddenly, the critical questions rise to the surface: In how many ways is professional art an amateur art? Can professional art be easily imitated by the amateur? The way is open for other challenging assertions. For instance, that much-abused old habit, skill: To discover the skill in art, we must first discover the art in skill. Or: To ask where the old traditions are in modern art, we must first ask where the modern is in the old art. This is not a mere game of idea inversions or word juggling. If it were, the new statement of ideas in reverse would be so sticky with uneasy, astringent meanings that quickly leap to mind. Nor is this a conclusive demonstration posed as an answer to the problems of art. It is an exercise of reason, an analytical approach in the examination of as yet unassailable notions. It might be seen as the first incision in cliché and slogan surgery to arrest the deterioration in art.
A new dualism of art and science, if we can agree on the premise as indispensable to art today (as it was in the Renaissance), must again seek to introduce commonly understood criteria and standards. We must reestablish certain major links with the past as historical background, consistent with art progress today. We must incorporate the old traditions that are still viable, still alive today. But which are the living traditions and how can we be sure? Let us apply the synergistic principle and make an incision.
Our civilization is predominantly an advanced technical age of science. It developed its abundant greatness from earlier civilizations and beginnings. Now, a question: Where do the earlier civilizations appear in the modern age of science? We must first ask, where does the modern age of science appear in earlier civilization? The answer seems clear: in those civilizations that have made
scientific contributions. The reason we search out the older civilizations, and attach their findings to ours, is a
scientific reason. This is true historically for our humanist-democratic institutions as well. Therefore, the answer to the older traditions in modern art lies in the context of the larger framework. Those art traditions that tend to live on have survived for a humanist-democratic scientific reason.
Where modern art has precisely been interested in the art of the world's cultures, across the seas and in the past, is the human reason, the scientific reason. But it has done this disorderly, capriciously, driven by impulse rather than direction. It has chosen,through uncritical acceptance of the nineteenth-century artists' hostility and rage against the antilibertarian French Academy, to continue the disparagement of the scientific, human anatomical figure as a sterile, mechanical, academic regression in art. It pronounces anatomical man dead in art. Anatomy as a rigor, a discipline in the refinement and skill of art, is debased in practice, study and education. The word
anatomical is today a term of contempt, and is made synonymous with "academic" in art circles. The rejection of the anatomical figure as a control has weakened the supportive structure of art, and one after another, scientific criteria are torn loose and discarded. The attempts to attach "new science" in art are essentially peripheral, tangential, quasi-scientific, makeshift concoctions, partially realized, fragmentary developments.
Art, by these new values, has become the undisciplined arena of the romantic delinquent and the playboy amateur, while the hard-working professional fights for his life.
What is art?
Final Fantasy is Art
