what is true art.

Art expressed.

A perilous definition.

The definition of creativity is elusive, despite expert opinion.

Governments, universities and businesses, say they want and understand creativity, art, culture, and leisure, but their actions belie their words, they fear creative thinking and doing, preferring structure, certainty and linear attainable goals.

Intelligent creative free thinkers apparently pose risks, but risk is where creativity lies

Our education system is trapped within post Victorian values, our government policies and so called independent arts organisations proliferate mediocrity and political, social and ideological rhetoric, repeating the same funding based thinking, terminology and out dated outcomes.

The arts are more disconnected from the people they aim to serve than ever before, reflected both in the individual, family, community, nation and the world, the general attitude of the public is that the arts serve little purpose, even though there is not one moment of their lives that they don’t interact with art and creativity.

Don’t ask what is art, but ask what does it do.

The creative process in all its manifestations and communications cannot be defined by its “content” – being subjective, and individually interpreted, it transcends, transports and transforms us by what cannot be contained and by what is received and interpreted.

The rise of the commodification of art and creativity together with the rise of the term “content”, and “product” to describe creative artistic cultural output is at best corrosive and misleading.

Art includes everything and involves everyone – the activity itself promotes independence, freedom, learning and links thinking, doing, feeling and beliefs as a multiplicity of connectedness, universality and continuity which is a shared experience and cannot be disassociated with being human which manifests as nature and nurture combined.

The only true art is not one of commodity, imitation or ideological theory – these are a symptom of globalised economic principles and survival.

Four types of aesthetic theory –

Aesthetic theories may be divided into four groups,

1. Theories of Imitation.

Also described as naturalism, realism, literal transcription, duplication of objectivity reality and skilful illusion. According to these theories, the true value work of art consists in its convincing representation of a given object. Such a standard is altogether inadequate, imitation implies above all a labour of external construction skill and technique and these are no justification for what is commonly held to be value in art. Judging them by their respective achievements, it is clear that the artist can seldom compete with the scientist in minute observation, and, as everyone knows is even less the rival of the photographer. It is relatively easy to draw attention to new achievements in the line of skill, technical efficiency, close observation, in the discovery and representation of objective truths. On the other hand, it is difficult to make people see the more intimate, original, genuine values that are not due to our effort or industry for example, the silent power of an undivided space, inner transparency, its radical simplicity, all the contemplative, self forgetful spirit that absorbs the artists whole personality and with which he is identified.

Naturalistic painting can display the fidelity to objective truth, equality of modesty and humility, of self- abnegation, of clarity. This is an authentic indispensable value the very substance of art,

every perception is in itself a transformation of an external stimulus into a psychic subjective reality of thought, for instance any perception somehow transcends the material multiplicity that we must assume to be in the stimulus. The reality of thought is all the stronger when the objective is contemplatively perceived and not considered as a means to an end.

2. Pragmatic Theories,

The remarkable example of Tolstoy comes at once to mind. He doubtless recognised in art the warm spiritual values that could on its own strength compete with charity, could conceivably be its antagonist, hence he condemned art except insofar as it might be a vehicle for charity. In considering the relationship between art and ethics the first point to make is this, moral not conventional values are, when active, all of a piece with other motive values in an encompassing kinship of values that lies at the very root of art. They are of course something quite different when they become the rule or preconceived end for which art is supposed to serve as a means.

Pragmatism tends to see and to define being in its instrumentality as a function and not in its own true nature and such a standard is I think especially inadequate in relation to art pragmatic theories and finds the value of art in something other than artistic activity. They ask us to appreciate usefulness of the work of art from different points of view or they may merely point to its worldly success or failure the artist is hardly considered in himself what matters most is the influence of other artists in his work and the influence of his own work on present or future generations artist treated as a social product. Now it is obvious that no condition of time or place should be overlooked apparent rights in his native language and this is an essential element of his art. It is surely not his chief characteristic he might feel much closer to a poet of another country or another age these theories ignore every intimate aspect of self realisation everything that the work of art truly is in itself everything intrinsic that can justify the worth and the name of the artist. He is reduced to a link in a chain of cause and effect to a machine that in itself is nothing such theories adopt the popular tendency to derive everything from something else representing and interpreting it by some standard other than its own and at the same time representing it as what it is not. Artistic awareness is not plumbed to its own depths is rather referred to the social or the subconscious, above all these theories can only take into account a world of objective existence of things, whether material or ideal consequently they fail to penetrate the intimate nature of art and thought.

Consumerism, materialism, marketing, publicity, graphics, product and content is not art.

3. Physiological theories. 

These too derive the value of art from something heterogeneous, that is, from something whose nature is quite different from that of art and that has no intelligible causal relation to the intrinsic value of art. They trace art back to its physical and physiological conditions. They ignore for instance the fact that even the sensational sweetness we find in sugar cannot be explained by this physicochemical determinants, that sweetness contains a quality of infinitude and inner unity, softness and tenuity, none of which belong to a merely quantitative or qualitative world.

Ratios, numbers, measurements, geometry, structure, mathematics, planning, composition, math etc all are inadequate and is not true art – it is only in the immediate act of creation that it assumes its essential quality of a new life.

4. Theories of expression as original reality.

Expression indicates the essential nature of poetic and artistic thought. The word is easily misunderstood, it has the virtue of underlining the importance of the sensible element whereby thought is realised and developed. Expression means realisation, actualisation, but not necessarily the outward actualisation so called execution. It signifies form, if by form one means not the completed form but the formative principle itself. (Active - creative) it is an original motive value, intimately and immediately purposive. It is thought itself in its aspect of light, rather than in its extrinsically purposive, practical and ethical, aspect. It is the value and the reality of an intimate self realisation.

Obviously expression should not be taken in the sense of the discharge as many psychologists understand it, even in reference to art, such notions are mechanistic. Nor should we use this word to denote the signs, accidents or gestures that attract attention because the express definite states of mind. Furthermore expression is not a symbol not a conventional sign and it should not be opposed to the so-called content, with which it is all of a piece. To sum up expression is coming to consciousness, the attaining of consciousness by means of intimate self-realisation.

The profound logic of thought is the very life of poetry and art. The most subtle delicate remote forgotten conceptual kinship's are revealed in poetry. Expression attains its reality, above all, in the moment of an infinite opening - an unlimited need for understanding, and exigency without which the power and reality of thought are altogether lacking.

Art realises this deeper logic, if, as we must, we also take the word logic in its etymological sense as logos the word. In the poetic creative essence - in creative spontaneity - there is a world or a centre of intrinsic truth, there is the whole lot of the psyche in nucleo. Here we find a primordial exigency of form and essentiality - and this speaks to our understanding. Implying for example novelty, unity, individuality, form as an infinite intimate demand, a feeling for the finite and the infinite, the seed of humility and pride, the immediacy however indistinct of a universally originating principle. Such values and modalities in the necessity of intrinsic truth make up the fabric of the imagination and their inexhaustible discovery in its primary spring.

Creative freedom I must insist should not in the first place be understood as freedom of choice but rather as true - not inertial, not altogether derived - positivity that it is fair to assume characterises subjective being in all living nature.

This underived element, this absolute presentness belongs preeminently to the essence of art. For the soul of expression is a subtle motive that operates in the absolute present, not antecedently. Awareness of it holds the sense of something eternally young, of contemplation, disinterestedness, something like the key to all human comprehension. This is the world of Art, a world of living potentialities, wherein the highest value also signifies a more radical ontological reality.

In art and in poetry, creative joy is in a distinctly characteristic way primary and immediate.

In a cosmos in which number and quantity seem overwhelmingly predominant, Art reveals quality as ultimately real in the very actuality of consciousness, a rich positivity, an active principle of potentiality that by itself implies an inner multiplicity, connectedness, universality and continuity.

This is the only true form of art and the only truly creative act, the rest are by products of ideological fantasies.

Art parallels life, promotes resilience and reflects the profound mysteries we have yet to understand.

Thankyou.

Jeff Walker.

Creative and Therapeutic Arts Practitioner.