Here’s a big question for artists: do the efforts and resources needed to make art, and the resulting artworks, help create a better place in the world?
How would we know if they did? What does it even mean to suggest ‘better’ or a ‘bettering’ of the world? Is it the artist’s role to better anything?
To me, a good measure of the value system of the artwork (and by default, the art-making) is if the combination of the art-making and the artwork tends to
- increase knowledge
- increase kindness
- increase likelihood of good health
- engage processes of nature on purpose
Obviously that last emphases (nature) is both a default (we are always engaging nature because we are part of nature), and a principle value of paying attention to the world, environment, our relationships to it. I admit that that’s more-or-less the emphases of my own art, and other art might be quite different in overall approach (I just think that paying attention to nature is better than not.) Increasing knowledge is a kind of critical-thinking, measuring, science-oriented opportunity… here the methods of the contemporary sciences are the most functional, fruitful, observant ways to assess what’s likely false and likely true, our best possible option for gaining good knowledge. Art doesn’t necessarily do that, but I kind of feel like it ought to, when it can. While understanding that the physical experience of the new artwork is also a kind of new knowledge (an experience), that didn’t exist before the artwork was made. And of course health, in art, may be exemplified by responsible use of materials and messaging, as different than an artwork that would either cause more pollution (is unhealthy or unkind in an environmental way), or that promotes active hate or crime (is unhealthy or unkind in an interpersonal way). The third value (increase likely good health) fuels the ability to accomplish the others; this is sustainability, or sustenance. Kindness means friendly, generous, considerate — the opposite would be mean, stingy, inconsiderate. A contrary list would be art that increases ignorance, promotes stingy inconsiderate meanness, that separates and disengages from nature, and likely makes us ill or unhealthy. Why would you want art to do any of that? Why wouldn’t we want an art of increasing knowledge, kindness, health and nature?
As a sort of catch-phrase that I made up to contain some of this is:
More Nature, More Science, More Art, Less Bullshit.
Although sometimes ‘less art’ would also work well, reducing ecological impact of the artwork too.
Bullshit, of course, is made of basic misleads, lies, increasing ignorance, anti-science and pseudo-science — sometimes entertaining but often self-defeating cognitive errors propped up as realities — a host of outdated forms of magical thinking, false beliefs, and mixed up delusions conveyed as if they were real or reliable. That’s a political statement… the con-artist and bullshit-artist disregard good evidence in favor of their own delusions. And often they gain power (politically or culturally) by convincing other people to go along with their falsehoods. In other words, I believe that good artwork is truthful rather than delusional, honest and delightful rather than dishonest and disconcerting — or is it? Communication itself is a substitution of metaphors and materials to point at larger realities and concepts… let’s be careful not to mistake the message (relying on associations as a type of fiction) for the reality that the messages are directing/re-directing toward — (the medium is part of the message and not the whole of it, and sometimes fictions articulate truths). (Although, I’ll take a good non-fiction description any day, for its better ability to articulate truths even more fully than the illusionisms of fictions.)
In other words, what does art look like and how might it function when it’s borne of simplicity, patience, togetherness and balance? How might the reverse work (complexity, impatience, loneliness, imbalance)? Does the artwork matter? Does knowledge? Does kindness?
To ask this core question (could the artwork help us make a better place in the world) is to ask what matters most… to ask about the values beneath the functions of the forms that we artists create — what is art for? What does art do? What does it point toward, or provoke us to think about? What is important? Or meaningful? Why make art? Why this artwork and this importance in this way — these materials, these forms, these communiques and these interactions? Does it do what it does in ways that are necessary and important enough to go to all the trouble of making and exhibiting the artwork?
Gregory Scheckler 