Bet you wish you were me

I am interested in the place art has in people's minds, or more specifically, why one person calls something art, and another says it's pretentous bullshit. Now, the idea that labels shape our universe is not surprising, since we each have a rather arbitrarilly detailed and not detailed model of the universe in our heads. We interact with our ideas of how the world around us will work, not so much the world itself. A few nights ago I went to sit down in my chair, and continue in my quest to proverbially try on the finest fines of the house's newly aquired "webtertron". I didn't however get this far, because the bottom of the chair, ya know, the part where I park my ass, fell through the frame and I spent a few seconds of total confusion, sitting on the floor, my legs up on the chair frame. It took me a relatively long time to understand what had happened. And it's because we trust the chair to operate as a chair does. It took all those few seconds (an eternity when there's exposed screws jabbing you in the legs) to change my mental model of the object with which I was interacting from a chair, to a framework of boards and padding. Or, less forgivingly, intro a pile of crap.

And this is what I'm talking about. Through whatever associations one has, they can look at the "object" of a painting, or a song, or a dance, or The Onion, and see it as bad. As crap. As a road of exploration they have zero interest in going down. While someone more curious, or open-minded, or well-adjusted, or simply with a different set of associations, can look at it with interest. Accept that it's what they define as art.

Because to me, art is anything that someone decides is art. And, of course, with that definition comes some responsibility to not overuse the term, because it cheapens the term, or perhaps dulls our senses in regard to any future art. So we shouldn't go nuts with the term "art" just because we can, but we should feel open to call something art if it may not seem that way, at first glance. Or if everyone else in the room vehemently disagrees.

Not that this is a problem. "Art" is as overused as "genius", and indeed, those words have lost meaning. If someone says something I do is genius I just assume they mean "cool". They liked what I did. It doesn't mean it's genius, it just means it surprised them. They couldn't have thought of it. So "art" and "genius" have really just come to mean something exciting and interesting, that took a human mind some work to create. Shrug, that isn't so bad. It's like people saying "peace" as "goodbye", or even the ever-popular exposed belly button that the kids love so much these days.

All of this in no way leads me to my next point, other than the basic thematic element of art, and a piece of art's varying effects in different contexts. And that is this. With the upcoming film, The Chronicles of Narnia, this page is both topical and just really intelligent.

Agape.