What do you want from Art?

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

27. Pretty close to the same.

I want it to either move me emotionally, or feel like it's telling me a story, or embodying something. And I want to feel that the artist had a specific vision or goal in mind, and took the time to bring that vision into reality.

Phillip Glass' music drives me up the wall, Jackson Pollock stuff looks like a junkie threw paint and feces at a canvas. A lot of modern art with things like steel girders of various sizes sticking off in various directions seems less like 'art' than the scribbles of small children with crayons.

Did you just 'whip it off'? It's not art.

Art is like any other endeavour. It takes forethought, planning, attention to detail, care to make the outcome match the original vision.

It can still be 'simple', and be appealing. Piet Mondrian spent a lot of time thinking about space, perception and balance, and came up with canvasses that can be crudely imitated, but still say 'art' to me. (And, btw, seeing a Mondrian online, you lose part of the experience - most images are lower resolution, and don't capture the way the different spaces were 'built' in layers, such that the paintings, which look purely 2 dimensional in pictures, are subtly 3 dimensional with white 'spaces' often having more depth than their coloured counterparts.)

So art is not just 'genius'. It's also 'work'. You can be a genius and create crap if you're not willing to put in the time to actually pull your vision together. Likewise, you can spend a hell of a lot of time aimlessly, and still have it be wasted if you're not working towards that vision the entire time.