I instantly felt ashamed because of course music is art. I can’t believe that my first thought was that it wasn’t. I’ve played the cello for eight years of my life, and I feel nearly the same connection to classical music as I do to art, so why do I not automatically think of it on the same level?

Sometimes I forget that studio art isn’t always the first thing that people think of when they hear the word “art.” There is so much more to the art world than that. Poems, music, paintings, etc. There is so much to be said about those things created out of thin air and a person’s thoughts. But if that’s the case, what isn’t art?

Liberal arts – areas of study (such as history, language, and literature) that are intended to give you general knowledge rather than to develop specific skills needed for a profession.

Studio art – the making of visual art (such as paintings, drawings or sculptures), contrasted to the study of art history.

Fine art – an activity requiring great skill or accomplishment.

All of these definitions are so entirely broad. The Liberal Arts College at the University of Iowa is lumped together with sciences, so does that mean that science is art? Math? Engineering? Based on the definition of liberal arts, it looks like it all would, depending on how it’s taught/learned. Fine art could mean anything that is done well that requires skill.

Combine all of these definitions together and you get the definition that makes sense: anything that you can try.

But this is different than I’ve ever thought about it before. I made an entire post (kind of) about this and specified that I don’t like thinking about art as something defined or set in stone. Mostly because I don’t think that something so vast should be defined, but also because if I think about it too much it freaks me out. I always say that I love what I do, my art, my paintings, my drawings, my photos, the thought process behind it all, and everything that goes along with it. What if I could replace the words “paintings”, “drawings,” and “photos,” with any words pertaining to any profession and have it mean the same thing? What if all that we ever do in our lives is art?

No. For some reason, I don’t believe that.

Because, like I’ve said, I have such a hard time believing that everything is art. I think that art is a case by case classification, that we can’t have a checklist of rules that helps us define something so intricate. I think that there’s a thin line, and that line is passion. That is something that I think most people can accept.

Say a civil engineer is trying to design a building that won’t fall during an earthquake. This engineer really cares about this because their hometown was just struck with a series of earthquakes that destroyed almost everything. This person finally achieves what they’ve been working on and decades down the line sees that building finally constructed. That would be their work of art. After putting so much passion into anything, it’s hard not to see it that way.

An anthropology grad student travels to India to do some fieldwork. They could have chosen to study sexuality or gender roles or kinship, it doesn’t matter. After they finally live with the people they’ve read about and have become fascinated with, they put together the notes they took, the interviews they conducted, all of the other research they’ve done and they create their thesis. That would be their art. They put passion, thought, and love into what they did.

A composer writes a symphony about someone or something they love. An artist creates a great way to get over their anxiety. A mathematician discovers some kind of cool math thing that they worked for years to discover. Someday someone could cure cancer. All of these things are works of art. People put their heart into them and they mean something. Someone, somewhere, at some point in time, was passionate about something and made something happen because of it, and that is what I think art should be. Not a series of vaguely defined terms.

Things that we hate, as I’ve already kind of touched upon, are art. Things that we love are art. Things that we ourselves are not passionate about are art, but as long as someone was at some point passionate about them they are. This is something that I am going to struggle with remembering, but if you’re anything like me you will look at this as another beautiful part of this gigantic world of art. There is now just more to marvel at, wonder about, and discuss. I am excited to see things this way.

The Looking Glass is a bimonthly column that aims to educate, analyze, and share different aspects and forms of art. It will focus on sharing and analyzing different artists, works of art, exhibitions, etc. Along with this, the column will ask questions and point out interesting controversies. Art is a constantly flowing and vast part of our society and our culture that we are all submerged in daily, and discussion about the medium is a critical part of a full understanding and open mind.

The post The Looking Glass: What Art Entails appeared first on KRUI Radio.

I had done a piece on feminism and the anxiety that surrounds the thousands of topics that feminism covers. When I walked into the final critique to see what people said, I was confident that mine would be well accepted. People hated it. No one accepted it in its entirety, there were different ideas about how to change it, and every single person in the room had a different opinion. I was hurt for about thirty seconds until I realized that it was the best experience I’ve ever had in the art program. It changed what I wanted to do and how I want to work. Honestly, now I just want to piss people off sometimes, and let me tell you why.

Sometimes I wish that I could scream it from the highest peak on Earth: “ART ISN’T ABOUT PRETTY THINGS!” In fact, if you look at it the way that I do most of the time, the process of creating is more important than the product. The reaction of the audience is also extremely important, but only if we know how to react. Art is about more than “this looks good” and “I like what you’re doing here.” The most frustrating thing to hear during a critique or a discussion or in any type of conversation is “oh, ok, that’s fine.” If it looks good, or people just like what you’re doing, or if it’s fine, that means it’s forgettable. Plain. Boring. The best way to make people remember what you have created is to make them feel something.

For example, there are paintings like Robert Rauschenberg’s on the left that hold a whole lot of conversation while being completely plain. All that the artist did was paint three canvases white and hang them next to each other. And the work made it into the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. When I was there, everyone in the room was in front of these three white canvases talking about it. There was a multitude of reactions, from curiosity to frustration to confusion to anger. “Why are there three canvases and not five?” “It represents purity.” “My three-year-old daughter could make that.” Even though I don’t really like that three white canvases got its way onto the walls of a museum when there are artists with different work struggling to get by, it is still the only piece that I remember from that trip, and apparently I saw some of my favorite artists’ work there. The controversy of the art is what got Rauschenberg in an influential museum. Emotions were attached to reactions, so people remembered it.

For an example closer to home, we could look at a statue put up on the Pentacrest only a year and a half ago. Serhat Tanyolacar, then an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, erected a seven-foot tall statue of a Ku Klux Klan member made of newspaper clippings from articles about the KKKs attacks. Reactions were, as I would only assume, very mixed. Some would stand by Tanyolacar because he was being an artist. Some expressed hatred towards Tanyolacar because the racism put forth towards the KKK is a very touchy subject. What I find most interesting is that the artist was offended that he didn’t get a one hundred percent positive response. He was confused as to why everyone didn’t like his work. This is interesting not only because it is a very clearly controversial topic to be touching upon, but also because if you are going to put any of your art out into the world whatsoever, you will never ever ever get a one hundred percent positive response. I am confused by this piece as a whole.

This is exactly what is to be loved most about art. I can still sit here and write forever about a painting or a statue that I resent. I can create some kind of conversation about it and I can critique it, and I can love some parts of it and hate others. There are some pieces that other artists work on for days and months and years that I can look at and feel absolutely nothing about. That’s the art I hate the most.

The concept of a controversy changed the way I want to do things. I went from wanting to take senior photos for the rest of my life to wanting to do everything and see everything and make everything and talk to people about it and create a discussion along with a painting or a silent film or a drawing. Can we please, dear lord, stop playing by rules and being safe. If every artist in the community did things that were only safe and only looked pretty, the medium would be boring. There would be nowhere left to go. I am excited to create a controversy and to find out about other artists’ controversies and to form opinions about those controversies. At least that’s where I am on the spectrum of art at this time. Apparently enough so that I can write an entire column about it.

The Looking Glass is a bimonthly column that aims to educate, analyze, and share different aspects and forms of art. It will focus on sharing and analyzing different artists, works of art, exhibitions, etc. Along with this, the column will ask questions and point out interesting controversies. Art is a constantly flowing and vast part of our society and our culture that we are all submerged in daily, and discussion about the medium is a critical part of a full understanding and open mind.

The post The Looking Glass: Why Being Controversial Isn’t Always Bad appeared first on KRUI Radio.

And there it is. “It’s so artsy.” 

I appreciated the intention of the phrase, I really did. I know what people are trying to say, I get that it’s supposed to be a compliment, and I used to take it that way. But that was before I was assigned twenty-hour long assignments.

“Artsy” insinuates cute and fun and whimsical. It means meaningless, effortless (not in a good way) and not at all complex. No artist wants to go into the opening of their gallery exhibition and hear people say that their work is “artsy.” It’s insulting. It belittles the work that the artist has put into their work. I’ve never met another art major that enjoys the word artsy.

This is not to say that the word doesn’t have its place, because it does. I fully expect photos of latte art on Instagram to be called artsy. Photos of a person standing next to street art are artsy. There are things that are artsy, and that isn’t a bad thing. But when I see people telling someone that their photos of their aesthetically pleasing desk are the true definition of art and others going to the student exhibitions in Art Building West and only giving them “artsy” as feedback, it makes me angry. I know that I’m not the only person who thinks this way; I’ve never met an art major who likes the word.

I’m not saying this is a one-way street. There are plenty of pieces that I’ve seen in art museums as prominent as the Chicago Art Institute (highly recommended) that I’ve looked at for significant amounts of time and thought, “I don’t understand why this is hanging in an exhibit right now.” I obviously don’t rule the world, and I haven’t researched every artist and every piece they’ve ever created, but the issue still stands. Things that are just artsy are credited as artistic and there are true works of art that are underrated and called artsy. (I’m looking at you, people who only go to art museums to take cool selfies and then leave. I see you people everywhere.)

To put this in context, let’s look at a really important artist. Ai Weiwei for example. Weiwei does important political work. He takes risks as a performance artist, has been put under house arrest, and considers the meaning behind what he does. Recently, he is visiting refugee camps in and around Greece and is posting photos and videos on his Instagram account often. Weiwei is a humanitarian and an artist. He is a controversy around the world, especially to the Chinese government. He makes people feel something deeper than, “I like this, everything is good, I have no problem with this.” He bases his art off of something he cares about (politics) and creates something for people to look at and see and analyze and discuss. No one would call Ai Weiwei artsy because of the time and effort and esteem that he’s earned over his life as an artist.

Like I said, “artsy” isn’t something that needs to or should disappear. My entire Instagram profile (shameless plug) is full of “artsy” photos, and I love them. Artsy is what turns most people into artists. Andy Warhol sketched in his spare time before he became a famous pop artist. Those sketches didn’t have meaning but were ultimately what made Warhol into an artist who was pivotal in the evolution of modern art. Pablo Picasso did the same thing decades before Warhol did, and we now learn about him in elementary school. Artsy is important until it isn’t anymore and an artist find what they’re really doing. To me, that’s the difference between “artsy” and “artistic.” For a piece to be artistic the artist has to have found their voice and their purpose and use them to create a greater message. If that’s still being found, it’s an experiment. It’s artsy.

However, this is all an opinion. My two art pre-requisite courses and one Intermedia class don’t give me the license to tell anyone what is and is not art, and maybe that’s part of the issue. The working definition of art is accepted by very few people, including me. Art runs deeper than creativity. Even further in that, I don’t think that art should be defined. Why define something so limitless and flowing and ever-moving? As long as people are constantly flowing and moving with it, the definition doesn’t exactly matter.

The Looking Glass is a bimonthly column that aims to educate, analyze, and share different aspects and forms of art. It will focus on sharing and analyzing different artists, works of art, exhibitions, etc. Along with this, the column will ask questions and point out interesting controversies. Art is a constantly flowing and vast part of our society and our culture that we are all submerged in daily, and discussion about the medium is a critical part of a full understanding and open mind.

The post The Looking Glass: What “Artsy” Actually Means appeared first on KRUI Radio.