Good Open
There is a starting off point in asking “Where are we now in art?” and that is important. I think it is very essential to stay open to varying accounts and kinds of surmising of what art is. It has been said that if you want to know truth you have to be comfortable with uncertainty. My interest continues to be most prominently in art as the craft of life. However even what that means may stay open to interpretation and remain profoundly malleable. What can we learn then from keeping the concept of art an open one and also how could this relate to our taking up of life itself as it is lived, as art or otherwise?
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a buddhist monk that I follow, through online modes of communication, has spoken of the importance of keeping the mind workable and pliable. He speaks of meditation as a means for doing this. My interests have taken that prompt and looked at what happens when you consider the making of the mind workable or pliable as art or at the very least an artistic endeavor. I feel it adds to the potential of the meditative journey and exploration to imbue it with, or perhaps more rightly stated, identifying within it, a sense of art.
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This has been one way in which I see a link to the art as life practice. However, meanwhile, the entirety of the art world keeps chugging along, with fairs, galleries, museums, exhibitions and so forth. Structures within that art world with nodes like curator, director, critic and even artist are still in place even though it seems very much that through the developments of relational aesthetics in the 90’s and social practice and social movements since that time, the essence of art has become one of a relational quality among people even far away from any of these, to my mind, now antiquated fixtures such as galleries, etc.
We need in a sense then new institutions or perhaps better stated new sites of community and social structures for the individual to thrive. In a relational world to use the terminology of relational aesthetics as it is set forth, I think the old structures and the way they operate are becoming outmoded. Not completely mind you but to the extent that a shift is ready. As I have stated before, and surely I am not alone, the art object has transitioned out of view literally and that previously housed energy there in the thing itself has been transmuted back into something so corporeal, so human in essence.
We are living in a time where ideas can be shared via video relation throughout the human network, ecosystem. This idea of publishing ideas just simply by getting them out of one’s head through writing them down on paper or putting them into the network of relations online or in person is also an immediate answer to the call of a response that is potentially elicited in each artist (i.e. each person). Thus sharing our work through conversation, social media posts and talks like TED or Pecha Kucha are ways in which we do our art.
I hope you see the subtle thread in this writing that is open to possibilities of what art can be. Exhibitions will continue and they can morph and transition as well (galleries may surely remain but I am asking what of a new entity-organization-site to address the changing nature of art as we know it now in 2018). Also a further development will surely transpire in the story of human thought and life energy even out beyond a conception that art is the craft of life however to affect this change and/or these changes we need to be able to lift our hold of certainty on what art and thus life itself may ultimately be. The sense that it is ever incremental goes along with this. In a sense then we can come to understand art as something to be grateful for in whatever form it comes to us in whatever fashion and know that simply to be ourselves could even transcend the notion of craft and reveal another new level or layer of understanding and life affirmation.
