Lee Emmerich Jamison
To most of us, even most artists, the arts look like magic. Hence the myth of "talent" in the arts. It is easiest in the face of that general misconception to go with the flow and treat art as a form of mystical enlightenment most people will never have access to.
That 's a mistake.
Human beings are self-aware. We not only ponder subjects such as our own existence and the nature of our finitude, we ponder our consideration of those subjects. To come to grips with the nature of these explorations we establish concepts to help us bridge the gaps between what is ponderable and what is knowable.
Such mental work starts with our earliest experiences, even with experience prior to birth. We have experiences. We seek to orient our minds to those experiences. To do so we develop cognitive structures that allow us to order our responses to sensory experience. Because we are social creatures some of these response/cognition structures are adapted to communication. We can share our adaptations to novelty and help others to develop cognitive structures analogous to those we have created for ourselves. Two major communication processes function to do this, the highly fragmented, symbolic, linguistic method, and the more fluid, but less tangible, inductive-artistic method.
Perspective is all-important in understanding a new approach to an old, but intractable, problem. It is well to remember the lesson of Gallileo's education of the Pope. From his own perspective it was so obvious he was correct that in writing his "Dialogue" on the motion of the planets he made out the character supporting the Ptolemaic position to be an obvious fool. This didn't play well with the Church and earned the scholar a life of house arrest. It probably also meant his ideas waited an extra generation to be accepted.
If one is going to be right it is a good idea to be civil about it.
From time to time I commit a terrible error and actually read someone's theory of art. What is amazing to me is how undisicplined such thought can be even among minds which presumably have some of the training in the keys to understanding. If you wish you can take a little time to see a case in point in the writings of a young philosopher named Micah Sparacio:
http://astro.temple.edu/~sparacio/artcore.html
These are the musings of a graduate student in Philosophy at a very good school on the nature of art. Given the other areas of his philosophical study, philosophy of the mind and artificial intelligence, he should have the foundations of understanding. He is, none the less, clueless. This is not to his discredit. His teachers and the whole philosophical world, as far as I can see, are likewise clueless.
Lee Emmerich Jamison
Very early in my career, when I was still teaching in Shreveport, one of my students caught me off guard with a question. "You can do so many things." she said, "Why did you choose to be an artist?"
I recall being uncomfortable at trying to answer, and taking a moment to understand myself. My reply was unsatisfactory. Indeed I have struggled with it ever since.
