Sunday, April 14, 2019

The Definition of Good Art, I Mean Really Good Art

The Definition of Good Art, I Mean Really Good Art
A day in the life, of a life. To live, to die, to repeat, yet to come into a world without understanding, and to leave it also understanding their place in the world, yet in a state of complete mystery is the state of all humans. The artist must strive to be above this place, and have a will to godhead that other humans try to defy, reason against, and must submit to the urge of the human will to power, to be more than mortal. And achieve in a way that is not human, while being human.


One might consider art to be something above an animal, though some have said that to be an artist is to seek out the divinity in the natural world that we see all around us. The greatest geniuses when I started on my journey to become a visual artist were all saying that art is imitation. Perfection maintained through mirrors, is the central premise that Socrates, one of the founders of Western thought, wrote about, in what of his legendary writings maintain, from “The world’s first Democracy”,in Athens Greece in the 4th Century BC.


There is an eternal feature to art, particularly really good art. The kind that wonders what one’s place is in the world, and seeks to study it, and somewhere in the forming of a belief and its structure, is the dissemblance of all else. A disbelief in the real and the now, is central to many phases and forms of art... Art seeks to critique and to poke fun at, simply by its state of being.


Plato, a contemporary of Socrates, writes that it is possible to fully know something, yet this is only maintained by dreams and ideas, which form our ideals. A chair is never really a chair, it is the imperfection of the thought compared to the “platonic ideal” chair. A chair, even in its makings has certain flaws and conditions, even when painted and laquered properly it exists in a state of decay that increases this deviation from the ideal norm with time. Thus the world exists in a state of decay. Yet humans outlive all equipment, which is readily seen walking out past an old farm, or a cabin you once visited as a child.


Between the faded Kodachrome images, and the distorted view of our mind that all humans deliver up... there is a questioning of what is real and what is perfection. In Classical times there was a belief in an absolute, and that all created art must be the most perfect form of some idea... which Plato would love. Yet this state is one that defies human understanding, and no photography and form was ever really up to the true ideal. Ideals change and as they do so dose the critique, analysis and import of an artistic creation.


Somewhere in this all we find true art, spiritual art, living art, that cares about the times and its ideals, its fads, its quirks, and its styles of the moment. Finding ones art in this is a little tricky, one who completely dedicates him or herself to ones style finds that style might quickly evolve past them, or they past it. Especially we find accelerated change in the time of the new forms of digital art, which include photo-manipulation, digital photography, digital tablet painting, and full 3D rendering, along with the more classical fractal art.


Thus, it is important for a contemporary artist to change, to move through and to create in different styles, yet maintain an artistic truth through these styles that speaks to platonic ideals and deeper meanings. A ghost that touches on and flits through meaning and definition to seek greater meaning, and does not dwell on the edifice and the concrete moment. In its lack of reality, it finds a higher understanding in its new Fauvin realism.



--- Prince Admiral Mike Katzberg, April 14, 2019