More on the Importance of Arts.

CONCEPT

After my post last week Makes You Think... (the Arts are Important), Amber wrote:

do you feel like it's different in writing and visual art? are you constantly bombarded with regulations, and the insistence that those regulations keep your work from having any chance of really accomplishing, anyway, what you hope it will?

and are the publishing industry and editors a brood of blood-thirsty, parasitic hyenas who only keep you alive for their own usurious profit?

A year ago I would not have known enough about the visual arts to think I knew an answer, but I can stab at one now (though I may lack enough examples to really make it stick). My thought is that artists in the two communities have similar problems arising from different contexts. In the case of literature, because books are sold to the public for profit in large numbers, it is undeniably a populist medium, however compromised that populism might be by market forces, another point I made last week.

The visual arts, on the other hand, as I understand it, are directed at a much smaller audience. Their largest public will be people who go to museums which very often are constrained to display either deceased artists (in which case the physical display of the art cannot affect the artist) or those who are already well-established. This means that galleries and private collectors become the economic force in the equation, and determine how much X and X is worth.

Two different problems.

In the first case, the public is large, tends towards a consensus of convention, and even when there is an exception, this can only be articulated via self-appointed critics who may be brilliant or may be idiots. In the second case, individuals determine the fallout, and while some individuals may have very experimental or open-minded stances on art, it still comes down to a few people dictating taste to the rest.

The end result, in both cases, is that I would say in both cases the creation of art is not regulated so much as compromised.

But I think there's another edge to that sword as well.

If there is a compromise, it's because there is a desire for art to situate itself publicly; to establish worth against a standard. That the standard itself is predominantly subjective, and often very compelling interpretations are at odds, does not mitigate the fact that having such a discussion in the first place that the arts must be relevant.

END OF POST.