Despite my previous essay about what my definition of art is, in retrospect it seemed a bit limited and simplistic despite still agreeing with most of it. Maybe it’s because of the weather, or maybe it’s because of my renewed interest in philosophy, but I’ve come across the feeling that the art world has been dancing on a corpse for a very long time. If art was the host and the venue, the art world has been dancing on its body for centuries both denying its rottenness while also fully embracing any last warmth that’s been found.
I generally despise the idea of being a ‘successful’ artist, where any career in making fine art means having connections with people that can afford your work, and the people that can afford fine art are typically the people who use art as a conduit to have a pseudoexperience of struggle. It feels insincere to join the party in hopes to win some great cultural lottery of becoming an arbiter of taste, without even giving myself the chance to dissect why I feel this way.
I had come to the conclusion that the level of authentic art made in correlation to the period spent after art’s death was irrelevant. In the same way a corpse is not “more alive” freshly after its death, the art world is not exempt from this rule.
I can only say with full certainty that art feels its most ‘alive’ when it’s at its most instinctual, an act that makes you curious, like how all stories are about love and death, art is no different. To me, art is an expression of dedication, curiosity, and exploration (love) while also a way to expel, escape, and compete (death). Art is alive when there's no money, no performance, no external voyeur; when it embodies the personal and isolating dedication to have an extension of one’s self that is humanized solely from who is personally experiencing it. Art is alive when the only audience is you. Art is killed when there’s nothing fresh, novel, or interesting, when it bores you, when it directly faces external commodification.
It feels like the art world plays with one giant corpse because all of the art made doesn’t feel self-serving. The artists that participate in its party commodify themself, make a brand solely for external consumption. There is still a level of dedication, but it lacks the foundational component of raw curiosity. Everything is forcefully expelled, there is no escape, and there is no competition. It feels like people make art not as an act of human instinct but as economic survival in exchange for voyeuristic consumption. The last time art felt alive was before the act of creation was commodified on an organizational level.
Art is the entertainment generated from the actions and thoughts of its process and its response, not the physical result– it’s “piece”. The internal exploration and connection of the self to the environment, defining your identity to the sum of one’s own actions and thoughts is where the art occurs, whereas the final creation is simply an avenue for connection and generating art within another person. When art is all about the product for another person, for an external voyeur, does the artist truly identify with the outcome? Is it an extension of the artist when the artist themself is a vehicle to general visual stimuli? There was no need to expel a desire, there was no internal comparison or competition.
It’s difficult to imagine a world where art is resuscitated, since it feels like it has been dead for so long. Ironically art feels alive when people who don’t pursue creative endeavors feel compelled to create something, to explore, or to use it as a conduit to escape. It doesn’t feel like art is made when people pursue it, joining a world that automates visual noise as a tool.