Reflections on art

I was asked to post a comment on Tim's blog entry "Artist Ideals and Reflective Judgements." Instead, I started my own blog.

This will be less of a coherent critique or support of any one specific part of the above entry, and more of a rambling reflection, as some of the ideas in the Tim's entry happen to relate to some independent thoughts I've had lately.

My first thought is a general challenge to the need to come up with "practical aesthetics" for the review and critique of art. I understand Tim's argument, and believe in the limited utility of having practical aesthetics for understanding why and how we value art, but something about the whole idea bothers me. I haven't thought enough about this yet to say much about why, so maybe it's better to just move on, and hopefully the why will emerge as I reflect.

I've been thinking about why I like certain kinds of music— what it is about that handful of artists, that handful of songs, that makes me go "YES! AWESOME!" I identify with the suggestion that we are drawn to art because of its "newness," but I think I look at the issue from a bit of a different angle. I find the whole notion of "classification," be it in creative writing, visual art, or music, worth considering. Classification is telling of our need to compartmentalize and standardize in an effort to understand. But in the realm of art, I find this need extremely unfortunate. I'm beginning to think that I like art that can't be classified...art that we just really can't quite rap our minds, or really, language, around. I think classification– saying that this painting is impressionist, this song is rap– is counter to the whole idea of what art should be. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate (as I do "practical aesthetics"), the need to classify, but I still find it unfortunate and inherently unartistic. Whenever people ask me what types, what categories, of music I like, I never really know quite what to say, because the music I like most always seems to be that which can't be easily categorized– that music of which I must say, "Well, it's sort of this, but it's also sort of that...really, you just need to listen to it." Just listen to it and let it affect you however it might without limiting your understanding with labels. An example: I recently ran across and subsequently became obsessed with a song called "Lynguistics" by CunninLynguists, of which the lastfm.com description reads, "Sampling genres from psych-rock to blues, New Romantic to polka, they have been musically compared to UGK and Atmosphere in the same breath." They are unclassifiable.

Broadly, I think I see art as a quest for understanding ourselves and the world around us, and how can something so ambitious be classified? I understand that we can in some sense classify the techniques and the tools involved in creating art, but can we really classify the art, the product, itself?

It seems like classification is a short-cut to "understanding," maybe a faux understanding. As a musician, I gave up trying to "understand" music long ago, but I think this is something I've failed to apply to poetry, which is why I'm still so intimidated by it. I've yet to reach the point where I can just let go and say that I don't need to "understand," but I can just appreciate it's beauty.

Of course, this is all rather idealized and unpractical, and for all intents and purposes I "support" the idea of classification through language as a means of ordering the world around us. But ultimately, I see our human effort to comprehend art (and how/why it speaks to us) almost as futile as our effort to comprehend God. The two are closely connected in my mind as I see art, from music to creation around us, as one of the most profound means given to us of connecting to God. We can discuss and critique all day long, but we never can reach a perfect understanding of either, and that's OK, because to have mystery is part of what it means to be art, and it is even more a part of what it means to be God.