“Human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money and status.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
Where does Art belong?
The question of where Art belongs has been circling my head this week, the automatic and obvious answer would be ...”well, Art belongs everywhere”, and in fact art can be, and for the most part is everywhere around us in some way, shape or form. But, in my semi-informed, non-intellectual opinion, the art that occupies public spaces around us is carefully curated, picked out from a wide range of options, sterilized for mass consumption, etc. ..maybe excluding guerrilla art, or “outlaw art” where artists impose their expression, unregulated and unfiltered, like street art / graffiti for example. Sometimes works of art are picked out because they match a “theme” in certain space, because they “bring the room together”, or make for a good conversation piece at parties. Im not saying that any of these reasons are either right or wrong, people will enhance their surroundings according to how they feel and what they choose to assign value to.
The strongest superpower that art has is that, not matter how personal and unique to the artists any given piece might be, once the work is done and out for public consumption, any person, group, or entity, can project whatever meaning, ideal, or even evils onto the work, regardless of how disconnected from the artist’s mindset at the moment of creation it might be.
So to take this writing closer to almost making some type of sense, where does art belong? I think it belong within our consciousness, wether it is the herd consciousness where the work is force fed to the public by non stop repetition until everyone agrees that it is the right choice. or if our understanding of the artwork is based of off the written description of an art dealer doing their best to sell the work by presenting it as highfalutin as humanly possible, in any of these scenarios, it still comes down to our personal understating of what any of it even means as it pertain to how we see ourselves.
So that painting that is hanging in the entry hallway that to this day you have a hard time explaining the meaning to visitors to when they ask, still lives comfortably in your subconscious because in there, somewhere it, it all makes sense.
This week at a glance
Thanks for reading,
Andres