This is a thought I had a few hours back, and thought I’d put it down in order to see what else I discovered along the way.
Where is art? Art, today, is broad. I’ll save you all the jargon and leave it at “omnipresent”. Furthermore, it is discernible to the human eye not through the straightforward impact it has on the human mind, but through the interpretation it is often subjected to, the kind of interpretation that enables it to yield an inadvertent variety. There is art in a little girl’s frock that I might not see but you might. There is art in what seems like “noisy music” to the ardent death metal fan. One can only opine, but one can’t ever judge on the beauty of things. As an absolutist, I do believe that art has an absolute form, but I also believe that humankind can never produce it. To me, this ‘absolute art’ lies in our creation, our form, our purpose, and the meaning we come to infuse in our respective individual existences.
What is happening? Before I digress further, let me come to the point. The first argument I have to make is on the commercialization of perspective. By this, I have to borrow some ideas from the capitalist economy. In such economies, demand and supply are the primary influencing factors. The best way to vary their effect on the market is to alter the elements that generate them in the first place: the products, and the money. Both the producer and the purchaser handle them in sufficient amounts, but in capitalism, greater power is given to the purchaser. Similarly, in the world of art, we have landed up in an age of inevitable commercialization of all things beautiful (or not). These could have been due to various reasons, many of which I am incapable of pursuing, but it is indeed that because of one phenomenon: art forms of one type seem to have larger markets than art forms of another – as opposed to a reduced disparity some decades before.
- Klimt’s ‘Golden Adele’ (1907), sold for $135 million
What is the effect this has had? This has led to the generation of strong influences that, more often than not, decide how many people look at a specific form of art. Take up the example of paintings and pottery. The great auction houses of London, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, are known to have sold paintings for upwards of a few million pounds. Has anyone ever heard of pottery being sold for that much? Why not? Ignoring a possible anthropological difference, the quickest conclusion is that the difference in demands is immense. Why is the demand immense? Because the works are valuable and provide for easy investment options. Why are they so valuable? Because their predecessors too held the same kind of value. And where did they obtain such values? From the people who bought them, the people who existed in that period. Although times have changed, perceptions have been held on to, often not in keeping with the contemporary conditions.
And what has this led to? In order to capitalize on what looks like an eternally growing market, artists will now begin to focus on paintings more than anything else – often irrespective of what their interests are. The utilitarian demands of life do surface at some points, and they cannot thus be blamed. Although what is happening cannot be termed a ‘crime’ and someone taken to task, this biased focus will magnify down the line, ultimately threatening to completely vaporize the market for a form of art that does not yield monetarily.
What can we do? If the effect is widespread, we can only make a difference over long periods of time. However, at the same time, we have no right to tell others what to appreciate and what not to appreciate. If you ask me, what we can do is make people aware of such effects. Instead of subduing the dominant art form, we can nurture the growth of the ignored.
Clathration Therapy 