Art, Science and the Big W

When we think about art, what do we think of? Our favorite artist hanging in the Getty? Or that funny cartoonist from Buzzfeed? Or a…

When we think about art, what do we think of? Our favorite artist hanging in the Getty? Or that funny cartoonist from Buzzfeed? Or a writer that changed our whole lives? For some, maybe we even think of the Beatles. What defines art and how has art changed over the years?

I want to understand what art is by definition and what it encompasses throughout industries and mediums. To first look at this, I see art as something simple: a question.

In such a content-heavy society, so many of us have experienced an overwhelming guilt, or fear, to constantly create new pieces that will go viral and create their “following.” But, what is art when we strip away all of the likes and retweets? Can there be art with no audience?

When we create, we are essentially asking ourselves a question or proposing an idea about the world and how we wish to understand it. Societal ideas can change in a matter of minutes today and we have to constantly sift through all of the possible questioning and reasoning to pump out art and boy is it exhausting.

I scroll constantly through media with art envy, wishing I came up with that idea or painted that landscape or captured that photo or even sang that song. I easily find myself lost at the question that the piece is trying to answer and instead feel guilty for consuming content rather than creating it. This overwhelming guilt has lead me to an attempt at identifying why we create in the first place and how to better develop as an individual in a space that has greatly altered what we define as art.

The first step to uncovering this very loaded and slightly depressing question is by defining what art truly is.

Art is Science. Science is Art

Yes, art is pretty. It is visually stimulating, pleasing and more often than not, about sex, but beyond all of the pop culture elements that we are so accustomed to today, art is much more.

Art and science are one in the same. Both are built upon the innate desire we have as humans to shape an understanding of the world around us. And I’m not just saying this because I’ve been listening to too much Philosophize This podcasts; I’m saying this because when overwhelmed in such a saturated artistic world, it helps me by getting back to the foundational elements that make up why we do the things we do.

Art and science start with a question:

If I do __ then what will happen?

In both, we form hypotheses, carry out experiments, present our findings and form conclusions to further our understanding of the world. So many scientists become multidisciplinary because that foundational element stays the same. Da Vinci, for example understood and took full advantage of our desire to form an understanding and embodies that ideal over a long list of studies.

So now we have art and science, both similar in their foundations and principles. To further simplify this foundation, could we not say that art and science fall under this larger more encompassing umbrella: experimentation? In both fields we are ultimately experimenting with an idea to create a new idea to be further explored down a long chain of continuous experimenting and revising…

Maybe I just made it more complicated…

Back to Why

Do you remember when you annoyed the shit out of your parents by asking them why about everything? And I mean everything.

Mom, why’s the pen made like this?

Mom, why’s the grass green?

Mom, why does a car make that noise?

As we have gotten older and have become dependent on the internet for answers, we seem to be taking more for face value. When the internet was first a thing, there was always that idea that we could never trust the internet.

Now, we say it as a joke, but I don’t really hear anyone ever questioning Google’s expertise when people are arguing about what year that shitty movie came out. Google has weirdly taken over our lives when 99% of the population don’t even know what Google stands for (in case you were wondering). And maybe, just maybe, that’s something we’re missing.

Maybe when we struggle to come up with new art or creative ideas, part of that is from our lack of Why’s. I wonder if one day we will become so reliant on technology that we no longer question things; we won’t have a desire to create art to understand our world and watch creative reasoning fly out the window and flipping us the finger on the way out.

If for somer reason you hate the word why, let’s add a different w-based question; What if.

What if you deconstructed and redesigned a logo or an album cover? What if you only used red paint or sunflowers? What if you smashed strawberry fields against a canvas while crying to The Beatles?

Why and what if are so simple and yet we take these creative tools for granted. Seeing an art as a type of beautiful science, I hope we can continue exploring the foundations of art, how it shapes our understanding of ourselves and our worlds, and do some experiments along the way.