(this is a work in progress)
Nobody can tolerate music that attempts to be modern art, except for those endowed with an artificial sense of sophistication.
Music actually has to sound good for it to be enjoyable, however for some reason this has not carried over to the art world.
Visual beauty is still appreciated, nobody likes modern art really, there are far more manga and anime appreciators than modern art appreciators.
People often critique it as aiming for "shallow appeal", and then when asked why would the appeal of modern art be not shallow, what means do you have to justify this assumption?
They can't explain it. They might say there's no idea behind it, but then how are they to justify the form it takes.
I hate my high school art class, I wanted to learn techniques so I could make stuff that was visually appealing to me.
That's all I cared about making something that looked good. But my art teacher on the other hand was like beauty is subjective (in the eye of the beholder),
all that matters is the idea one expresses, then he went on to show us a spaceX orbital rocket ship, that is also a plane,
and then asked us to take scraps of paper and tape and construct "paper airplanes" that didn't need to fly.
This came off to me as offensive, comparing a technological feat that requires to deeply conform to the laws of nature
with something along the lines of an arts and crafts activity in a kindergarten. He got his masters in art from Emily Carr art school.
Now more recently I watched a video from 3blue1brown that introduces a artist called Sol Lewitt, wait that name sounds Jewish, ah I was right yet another influential Jew.
Anyways his art philosophy seems to aligns exactly with my art teacher's art philosophy, and that is one completely detached from technical skill,
many of his art pieces were written instructions to be performed by trained installers, like a composer writes a composition to be played by musicians.
"The idea becomes a machine that makes art." - Sol Lewitt Paragraphs on Conceptual Art
Now are Sol Lewitt's ideas platonic ideas? I guess they do produce some form, much like a mathematical algorithm produces a fractal,
but I'm pretty sure that the rules or conditions that let the archetypes shine through are the platonic archetypes themselves.
Well it seems like a noble goal at first, but his art does not display any sort of transcendent beauty, but is rather chaotic and empty of the forms he seeks to achieve.
Take this Sol Lewitt composition for instance:
On a wall surface, any continuous stretch of wall, using a hard pencil, place fifty points at random.
The points should be evenly distributed over the area of the wall.
All of the points should be connected by straight lines.
With these instructions unlike with a fractal, he doesn't reveal any underlying harmony just the arbitrary and mysterious,
that people who like to think they are sophisticated pretend to understand.
This Sol Lewitt piece, actually has very deep symbolism to egalitarian dogmas and even the relativistic statement that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
It is a clear symbol a clear sign of the times, the flattened "everything connected to everything", you find it in new age spirituality and multiculturalism.
Sol Lewitt has effectively constructed something like a symbol of pseudo or counter initiation.
Now due to my grievances with my high school art class and in response to the idea that beauty is entirely subject I wrote this quite a while ago.
Personally, I have always wanted to make truly beautiful art.
In relation to this desire, the questions arose: "what makes something Beautiful?"
"How do I know whether my art is actually Beautiful or not?"
Intuitively, I rejected the popular notion that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder",
I was searching for a definition of Beauty that is objective, Universal,
and therefore discernible by direct perception, not by subjective "taste".
In other words, a Beauty that exists independently from any individual,
and that one's inability to perceive it means, one is either not "looking" at it,
or is actively ignoring it, much like one ignores the ticking of a clock and other background sounds.
In my search for a defintion, I figured Beauty is what Beauty does
and that is: to bring pleasure or joy to those who percieve it,
and this, more or less falls in line with a standard dictionary definition of beauty.
But this definition still fails to answer our original question "what makes something Beautiful?",
and even more importantly "why are things Beautiful?"
So what is it that makes an Universally Beautiful object bring a sense of joy and pleasure to those who participate in its perception?
To answer this we must examine the nature of Universal Joy.
Like anything else, we can only understand Joy in relation to what it is not.
And what most acutely contrasts Joy is suffering,
and we already know that all suffering is born from desire,
and all desire is born from a state of incompleteness or limitation.
So Universal Joy is a state without incompleteness or limitation,
a state of Absolute freedom and limitlessness.
However, since every definition is itself a limitation,
the Limitless cannot be defined and is therefore not anything in particular.
The objective expression of Beauty is therefore the Limitless expressed by means of a limit.
So what does this mean in a more practical sense?
Beauty, being perfection, is mystery and regularity,
the limitless (mystery, feminity) expressed by means of a limit (regularity masculinity).
Regularity without mystery is devoid of space and depth, meaning it cannot express the limitless,
and so is devoid of the quality of Divine bliss which makes things beautiful.
The mystery is the unpredictable expression of the principle of indefinite Possibility, which makes things novel, and regularity prevents an incoherent chaos or noise.
It is the harmonious balance of regularity and mystery which produces perfection.
I need to make my website more aesthetic and pretty.
contact me here: nekobusses@cock.li or nekobusses@protonmail.ch