The Artist’s Job
Nov 27th, 2007 by Micah Tillman
Continuing in the vein of last night’s post, I have one more thought about beauty.
The job of the artist is to discover where beauty is happening and then capture it (so as to show everyone else).
I take as my model the photographer. Her subjects are not beautiful from all angles, in all lights, etc. She must discover the angle from which beauty can be seen, and capture it. This is where composition comes in, I suppose.
Artists, then, are explorers. They do not make things look beautiful (they do not create the beauty). Rather, they discover the places from which beauty can be seen. They find the spots where beauty appears, and then let us in on it.
In this sense, artists are leaders or guides.
I haven’t yet figured out how all this applies to non-pictographic artists (e.g., musicians, poets, sculptors, choreographers) but I’m willing to bet it does.
I think it can easily apply to different sorts of arts.
The human body doesn’t always move in an attractive fashion. But choreographers can take the body and show how beautifully it can move.
Similarly, music is, at its most basic level, just made up of individual tones, about which there isn’t necessarily anything beautiful or attractive. Think of a violin teacher’s pitch machine — our strings teacher had one back in middle school, and it would just drone an A for as long as it was switched on. A note by itself isn’t always nice. But composers (and then performers) arrange those tones into chords and melodies and they can suddenly become beautiful.
I think that art is a combination of revealing beauty and creating it, in different ratios perhaps depending on the medium. With photography, the artist’s function is more to reveal. With music, it is for the composer more to create — but again, for the performer, more to reveal. I don’t know if those two functions can be separated.
Nice. I like what you have to say. Hmmm . . . .
I like it, sort of. I cringe at the thought of definitely declaring what the artist’s “job” is.
What about painters like Willem de Kooning ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_de_Kooning ) and Francis Bacon ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon_(painter) ) whose art is neither beautiful nor meant to be? What about photographers who depict poverty, prostitution, etc. Are these people not artists because they are depicting/communicating beautiful things?
PS: Missed a “not” in that last sentance, and the Francis Bacon site didn’t link up correctly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon_(painter)
how paul klee put it…. “an artist neither serves nor rules, he transmits” …. which for me is something beyond capturing beauty… what is transmitted is that which beauty also reveals…
enjoy
Perhaps an artist job is to begin by noticing things and then to share with his/her audience what they’ve noticed.
This is maybe banal or at least basic… But I think it’s exactly right to notice that many artists observe the bleak, depressing, etc.
It also covers a variety of media… Visual and non visual, representational and nonrepresentational.
I think this would imply that finds something worth noticing and conveys it in a way that people get it. This definition would probably not appeal to lots of modern artists, who claim to be disinterested in artist identity and intent, and who seem to relish having obscure meaning. But a lot hinges on how widely we view what’s being noticed… I don’t think it would have to necessarily be some specific proposition but might be something more general, a feeling, a sense of harmony or disharmony, unity or disunity…
This definition is probably weakest in terms of arts such as music and dance… Which leads me to wonder about the coherence of the term “art” as a whole. Is there any good reason to suppose a grand unifying theory of art is even possible? Or could it be that each type of art will end up with fairly different aesthetic criteria?
jeff i like your definition, and i can see it working for dance too, and music, of course
on a bad day, say i’m depressed, i personally feel that i should not spread it around to my friends, and either make them feel bad, or get pissed at me…. it is the same with art…
in this way i consider art to be a service, giving a notation to something i have seen that is good in the world, that uplifts the viewer’s life….
but the art world loves “stress on the walls” and says that even if you feel revulsion, intensely, that means it is doing its job as good art…. i say, not for me
enjoy
[...] as the Artist has a “job,” the Thinker has one [...]