Random unedited thoughts on art

If we look at the history of Western art, I think there's a definite point at which the majority of artists changed their view of what they did from a mode of "excellence" to a mode of "originality" (see e.g. this page from Francis A. Waterhouse, "Romantic 'Originality'" in The Sewanee Review Vol. 34, No. 1, Jan. 1926), pp. 40-49). What was valued as excellent changed at various times, but it was still a striving for being "the best" at a certain skill set. Once the modality changes to originality, that whole idea of greatness gets thrown out in favor of "genius," which means being utterly unique and different than everybody else. Not surprisingly this also carries over into personality, so corresponds to the rise of celebrity. If you go to a museum that has art from many different eras, the older the art the less the artwork will be the reflection of a personality. It'll be more the reflection of a culture as a whole, often a highly religious culture. Personality only starts to emerge in the Renaissance and then really takes off during the Enlightenment and Romantic eras into the 20th century by which point artists are basically worshipped as divinely-inspired lunatics (because no personality is more interesting to us than one who is socially deviant. That's also why Showtime has a popular long-running show about a serial killer. And why we love anti-heroes. We love the idea of transgressing society's rules, because we are individualists and we all think we're special even though we deny this, as we must, if anyone asks. It's not that we think we're above the law so much as we think that if we ever broke the law, it would be because we had such a DAMN good reason for it, that it would have to be acceptable. The full implications and consequences of this form of post hoc self-justification/aggrandization are also the main focus of Breaking Bad.)

I'm sure there's plenty more to read on this topic, but the book I can't wait to get my hands on is Original Copy by Robert Macfarlane (obligatory Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Original-Copy-Plagiarism-Originality-Nineteenth-Century/dp/0199296502/). Just from peeking at the first couple of pages in the preview, I'm feeling like I might actually be legitimately onto something with at least some of the stuff I was blathering about in the above paragraph.

I got into this as an investigation into the nature of human creativity versus how that gets expressed in our culture (see my previous post for further thoughts on this). Now, I've heard it argued that consciousness itself is a creative act, and I have no counter-argument to that*. Reality as we experience it is generated entirely by our brains, so it is literally our creation (although, insofar as our minds are shaped through socialization, it might be better to think of this as a "group project"). Perhaps then, rather than a projection of the artist's consciousness, we can think of works of art as lenses through which we can focus the light of our consciousness in order to experience reality in some different way. Art then would be a tool like a microscope or telescope to help one see things one can't normally see (where "seeing" is just an analogue for any possible kind of qualitative sensation, including emotional states as well as sensations).

*There's no qualitative difference between dream-consciousness and waking-consciousness, for example. They both seem real while they're happening, but there's no objective way of determining which one has primacy in terms of an abstract notion of "reality." This goes back to Descartes and the idea that what the senses give us is mere illusion. But there's a problem with framing things this way. An illusion implies that there's an underlying reality. Kant postulated that there is such a thing as an underlying reality but that we have no access to it. (Given the religious underpinnings of his metaphysics, it seems like wanton cruelty on the part of God to instill us with insatiable curiosity under such circumstances.) I think perhaps a better term than "illusion" is "interpretation." Our brains interpret the data collected by our senses, synthesizing it into a construct that has both meaning and use for us. Surely this is a sounder notion than that our senses are somehow constantly fooling us with cheap tricks, almost as if we were rubes at a carnival sideshow or something.