One of the things that people kept asking at the Art Hop the other night when they looked at the Time Machine was, "Is this art?" I can't say that I blame them, because you know, really, it started off as a hair dryer until Carl saw something crazy in it and began modifying it. It's funny how we often get hung up on "What is art?" as if there were some sort of empirical test we could apply to any object or work and know that yes, this one is art while no, that one is not. And I think the main reason people want that sort of test is so that they don't look foolish appreciating something that someone else thinks is silly or junk. Most of us just don't want to look foolish in front of anyone.
But the bottom line is, it's art if it's art to you. Period. It really doesn't have to be art to anyone else to qualify, because your appreciation of it, your interaction with it (whether it's intellectual because it provokes thoughts, visceral because it provokes feelings, tactile because you're actually physcially interacting with it or all of the above) makes it art. (I could now digress into a very lengthy philosophical discussion here where I pull out a bunch of dead philosophers and why "art... arts (verb)" and so forth. And we could argue to the death as to whether something functional can also be "art" and whether "art" should be divided from "craft" and why and how and good god, wouldn't that be dull? And rather pointless. With a Masters in Philosophy, I would bet I could bore the pants off you right about now, but even I know it's boring to listen to a lot of dead philosophers because the whole exercise would contradict the point... that you don't have to listen to what other people think, it only matters what you think. So there ya go, philosophy in a nut shell.) (Um, not literally, I hope.)
When one of the men attending the Art Hop walked forward toward the Time Machine (laughing, seeming eager to ride it), he asked me, "Is this art?" And not wanting to sound pretentious, I said, "I don't know if it's art or not. I just know it's making a lot of people laugh, and that was the point." He nodded, smiling even bigger, and he enjoyed his "flight." (I think he went to the Fiji Islands. I also think he had decided he was 18 again.)
How can that not be art? The art of making people laugh, of transporting them, however via imagination, to another place... whether they were pretending to be elsewhere or they were simply allowing themselves to let go for a moment of their rigid "public" face and be a kid again and have fun and pretend.
I hope that today, even if it's for a few minutes, you'll go out and "art"... try your hand at something. You can be very very bad at it, that's okay. It's not the quality that makes it art, it's the effort, the interaction. You don't have to show anyone, either -- it's not a contest. But start. Give yourself a chance to do something creative. There is no "bad" here, there is only play. So go. Art a little. It'll change your world, even if for only a little while.
Posted by toni at May 25, 2004 03:11 PM