What is art?
Through our client UNIKA, we were intensively engaged with this issue and question in the last few weeks. Thereby, we first noticed the possible different perspectives of and about art. A client / consumer has a different terminology for art than the artist / craftsman of himself and his work. In addition, there is nowadays not only the actual art – I’ll get there later on – but also the “produced” art: art as pure goods or art-bet on an imaginary value.
Furthermore, we need to bethink on what art is allowed to do?
My Personal View (MPV): Art should not serve politics, the current dogma or social thinking; art need to remain independent, stimulate exclusively by itself and create awareness. Possibly, art can and should reflect the current events of an era, as it has always done. Art is a snapshot where the epochs are getting shorter because the values, views and topics of today change or adapt much faster as they have done earlier.
Art should stimulate, think ahead, surprise. For centuries, art was just a reflection of the current events. Art was something rare, or in the case of craftsmanship commonplace, but through the work valuable. Only a few had the technical skills to actually create something.
Today, art is omnipresent – everywhere art is created in a multi-layered manner, and always labeled: this is art! However, art is art because of the eye of the differentiated observer, and not because of a label. Also, art will show as art if it remains over the time of now. So, only in retrospect it can be seen what has impressed so much that it remains in the minds and heads of people. In this respect, the value of a work of art is determined not only by the facts of processed time, the used materials and the creative effort, but is subject to a development process that the customer / consumer is going through. This evolution of values can take centuries. You may account for taste, but art is not art because an individual defines art by itself, but because a work has left the same feeling in a social environment.
Everything else – the hype – is pure marketing, skillful communication, manipulation and inflationary speculation. I think true art must also come from ability; where ability is not just the use of craft materials, but the skill to make the resulting thought in the head, mind, body – even joke / irony / madness / melancholy / mystery / history / stories – visible.
Linked with this issue, we would like to recommend a book (only in German):