What’s the point of art?
Posted
#92
(In Topic #87)

Site director

To clarify, let’s compare an artwork to a scientific paper3. A scientific paper attempts to make its findings as clear and persuasive as possible. It does this by detailing experimental methods—how the author achieved the results. And the paper refers to other scientific papers to show that the author has done their homework (so to speak). It says, in essence, three things:
3 Yes, depending on how you define art, a scientific paper can be an artwork too. But bear with me for the sake of argument. ↩
We (the authors) have read what other people in this field are doing;
Seeing a (possible) gap, we ran this set of experiments;
Based on the results we conclude that these things are true…
The paper is precise and constrained in what it asserts. But the precision and transparency are all in the service of persuading you of an argument.
Art aims to ‘move by suggestion’, rather than by argument. It ‘wakes’ something inside us. It digs up memories and associations. We read a poem, and we can smell fresh-cut grass and the neighbour’s burning rubbish. We watch a movie and we cry when Old Yeller has to be put down. We view a painting, and something about it makes us feel tight in the chest. Art deals in sensations and experiences. So, in one sense, it has a broader range of communication than the scientific paper. But as a consequence, it is much less precise. The artist has much less control over how the viewer perceives their work. Yet the artist has the freedom to communicate much more than the scientist.
Read more at: What's the Point of Art?
1 guest and 0 members have just viewed this.
Control functions: