Well, I don't know where to begin so I'll not bore myself with where I started. It occurred to me today that a huge part of what makes art great is the cost of producing it, or at least the perception of the cost of producing it. Not in terms of money or materials, but in terms of human costs. The universal currency of time, blood, and sweat.
Seeing a nice installation is neat, but if it looks like, with enough money and a stockpile of whatever and a staff of interns, it could have been put together without much blood, sweat, or time, it had better be pretty mentally challenging to perceive to create a feeling of value, regardless of personal tastes. I guess that's what is galling sometimes. In terms of writing. Writing is ridiculously time intensive, but the perception is so often that the hard part is developing some new and insightful perspective. Honestly I think it's the other way around. Before I chase that rabbit though I want to go farther down the art hole.
Everyone has personal tastes and likes and dislikes. Whatever, that's not news. A major component of art appreciation transcends likes and dislikes. People can appreciate monuments, whether they like or dislike what the thing stands for, because they can understand the difficulty of moving a brick so many feet from one point to another point. Maybe not so much now with machines to do things, and construction being a shrinking sector and people growing up not understanding how to use hammers and wrenches and whatnot. And I think the clearer art can demonstrate the intensive effort of it's production the more easily it is appreciated.
Sometimes it means producing things on a huge scale. Sometimes it is fulfilled in creating things with dozens, maybe hundreds, of physical layers. In electronic media it may mean creating something by hand at a ridiculously minute resolution or something that evidences sampling over a huge span of time or archive work that demands exploration of a great span of time units, whatever those units may be. Or maybe selection and hand picking of complex individual components for inclusion into the final composition. Whatever it is, however it demonstrates it, the appeal of art is, I feel, in large part attributable to the perception of the effort required to produce it and entirely apart from the perception of skill, talent, and other addends that went into its development. That's what makes people want these things.
People who can identify the human cost of producing a thing want it, on some level if not entirely (assuming it doesn't fix their fancy to begin with), because they know that such and such an amount of someone's being is in it. Permanently. And they can own that part of that person's being. It's not a bad thing. It does make me wonder if the majority of art owners, if it is even possible to measure something like that, are male. I bet a big part of the art school curriculum explores these topics. I hope art student kids don't think of me as a poseur. "He didn't go to art school, he's not allowed to talk about art stuff." Whatever. The closest some people get to composition is writing their shopping lists for the grocery store and they think they can comment on writing. I wonder if writers, by and large, hate artists? Writing is just systematized art. Art is just codified writing. Poetry is the intersection. Alright, back to what I was doing before. Just wanted to think about art aloud for a few minutes. Can you imagine the cavemen debating over whose cave scrawls made more sense? Nope, neither can I.
///The Eagles - "
Take It Easy" It's not a good song, but it is easy to listen to. I would recommend it for filler between things you really want to listen to. Perhaps, play it to fill the minutes you need to go use the bathroom. It really is like highway rest stop atrium music. Can't you hear this echoing on burgundy tile at 9 in the morning a couple hundred miles from your destination in a glassed up rest stop and your ass hurts and you don't really want to eat Roy Rogers for any reason, but you already ate Mcdonalds for dinner and had the worst shits of your life a couple hundred miles before you had to get out and take a leak and realized you were hungrier than a fox fresh out of eggs?
