"Ars gratia artis"

Lindsi & Heidi, if you’re out there, I think you will sympathize with me when I say that I’m not sure what art is any more. I thought I knew what it was – the Mona Lisa, stuff in the Louvre, the Sistine Chapel, art that looks like our usual connotation of “high” art. Art is literature as well. And this “high” art is art, without doubt, but there are some that will say that art is much more. And this begs the question of where does art end and just what seems like not really anything begin. Now again, Heidi, Lindsi and I have been reading about various theories of art, and for the life of me I know not what to make of it. I know this though; I’m not an artist. I’ve tried to write some poems, and they’re not really that good. I even tried to write some dactylic hexameter, and I think the only portion that fell into natural dactyls was one I stole from Lucretius: “Quare etiamque etiam…” I cannot draw or paint. I don’t think that artists are as plentiful as some might believe. I want art to be a fine Greek black-figure vase, or a painting that hangs in a museum. But my opinion is one that is quickly becoming outdated it seems. Postmodern conceptions of art basically open art up to be nearly anything, but if something is anything, isn’t it basically nothing? It’s like if you hold a belief, and you violate the belief, is it really a belief? Does not the belief-concept implode? Perhaps not. Unless it does. It might be easier to say that art is what we conceive to be art. But the “we” varies. What is “l’objet petit a” and how does this correspond to our Desire? (Shane??) Art as desire-- maybe.

Art is necessary, but different folks tell us why for different reasons. Some would say that it is the divine essence within that strives to produce art. Others would say that artistic minds are born: they see the creative process, and they produce creatively. Some might say there is an artist within us all. Still others would say that the artist, the writer, the author, are “dead” figuratively. Dead inasmuch as the artist is nothing more than one who brings into being a performative as such, a bricoleur creating his bricolage. (You takin’ all this in Lindsi?) Others say we call ourselves into being through art – the ouroboros. And then the artist can be a product of Ideological State Apparatuses who in turn function within the General Modes of Production which drive Artistic Modes of Production. All creativity is after a fashion super-determined – dialectical materialism – etc. You can explain it away, but never pin it down. The answer to the question of “why is there art?” is that it is the question with no answer. Art is not necessary from a standpoint of survival. But art is an avenue to channel whatever it is within the human being into a representation of thought. Art is only necessary in the sentiment that it is a necessity that we express ourselves -- and it this not necessary? Finding the answers to all the questions is not possible for we know not even all the questions themselves -- once we leave logocentrism behind. What is true truth, the "vrai verite?" Most questions have no concrete answers, but art maybe helps this process of discovering whether or not we want to "know" the answer or back away from the "mise en abime."