Art and Literature

[ryos]

Psychotronic wrote: Well, I don't want to argue with you, because you've got your mind made up,

Hey...I've been known to change my mind before. It's not unheard of. So argue away!

...but I would be very careful about passing any sort of judgment on a painter based on a picture you've seen on the internet. Pollack's paintings don't look like much on a screen because they're paintings. They're three dimensional and meaty and often huge.

Fair enough. I've been to the Denver Art Museum a few times, and I can definitely see what you mean. Some of the humongous pieces are stunning.

I've spent hours looking at a single Pollack at the National Gallery or the Seattle Art Museum or wherever, because it can be an intense and emotional experience. I don't know what you think

higher art

means, but for me, it's about feeling a strong connection to an artist who has managed to communicate something truthful about themselves through a piece of artwork, and it's about learning something valuable about who I am through that experience. Really good artists, like Pollack, can make that happen. Abstraction and expressionism aren't just a fad or a vogue, because we'll never run out of artists who have their own unique point of view, and with luck, some of them will always be talented.

See, that's the first time anyone has ever made any attempt to explain to me the point of abstract art. I think that's mostly because there are very few (if any) non-art-lovers who actually understand, appreciate, and enjoy it! And I don't know many art lovers...can't think of any off the top of my head!

All I've ever heard is that they're

expressing.

The natural question is,

expressing what?

In the case of abstract art, it seems that no mere mortal can ascertain the answer to that question without training, and nobody with training seems willing to explain. All the layman (well, me) can see is a bunch of noise that doesn't add up to anything. The natural reaction is,

People get paid to make that junk? Anyone can splatter paint on a canvas, so how is that art?

With time, I've come to associate

expression

with

nonsensical garbage that I don't understand

and therefore

that thing that ruins every artist and piece of art it touches.

Can you see how I might come to view expression in art, and especially expressionism, with bitterness and contempt?

Now, thanks to you, I know a little of the what and why of abstract art and expression, and I have questions. Questions like: how can an image that doesn't mean anything evoke emotion? Is there something about abstraction that lends itself to the encoding of emotions in visual form? Because it seems to me that an image that looks like something identifiable would do a much better job of, ahem, identifying what it's talking about.

And, finally...is art better at conveying emotion than music? Because music practically *is* emotion, distilled into audible form. Music stinks at communicating ideas, though, something that art can excel at.

Sorry for all the questions; you don't have to answer if you don't feel like it. I'm just excited because I'm closer to unraveling one of the great mysteries of the universe (abstract art and why it exists) than I ever have been before. Will you help me understand? ;D

The reason I couldn't stay interested in Escher is that he doesn't have the emotional impact that other artists have. I was probably 25 years old before I ever saw a painting that made me feel something profound, but once that happened, I really couldn't go back to Dali and Escher and Giger.

Hiuh. Maybe I'm just too young then. As they say in Spain,

¡Me falta un año todavía!