Art

Imagine a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, so big you can stand on top of it and not see any of the puzzle’s edges. Picture whatever dazzling patterns you wish on each jigsaw piece, all of them intertwining perfectly with the ones next to them. And, important to note: each piece is dazzlingly beautiful and glows with energy - no matter how far you travel along the jigsaw you will not find a piece that doesn’t pleasure your eyes to stare at. This is a good way to view art, but it is the opposite of how most people view it. Let’s use music as an example. Each piece of the jigsaw could be a different artist or band, or a different album, or different song, or all three. We are told that we have specific music tastes that are unique to us, and we hone our tastes to a specific area, say pop punk, or electric jazz, or industrial hip-hop, and out of this grows all of our other “tastes”. Instead of a jigsaw we make a list of our favourites or of the best of all time, and we compare each entry, championing some and throwing our snobbery on others. Now look at the Jigsaw Model: nobody likes one piece of a jigsaw more than the others, they simply fit them in when they are needed and create a complete whole. This is a way to see art. You may like one artist and hate another, but in ten years it might be the other way around. You might discover a song and hate it, later become a fan of the genre, and then return to the song and finally “get it”. Culture, especially the internet, wants you to believe that liking or disliking an album, or giving it a rating out of five or ten, is a stamp of your individuality and that it means something, when really it is only a passing feeling, a singular time-specific biased perspective, and means nothing, it simply adds another person’s tastes to the databanks. You may think Rebecca Black’s Friday is an abomination, but a lot of people did enjoy it, I imagine a lot of people enjoyed it because they were laughing at how terrible they thought it was, but even this is enjoyment just of a different type, and some people did find it catchy and enjoyed it as an actual listening experience. If you didn’t like it then this has nothing to do with Right or Wrong, it is simply on a different part of the jigsaw from where you are standing, and maybe this piece will never light up for you, maybe it will; it is already lit up for a lot of people. See the art you dislike simply as something you can’t reach at the present moment, that is made from a different perspective or for different reasons than what you are used to or what you are looking for in the present moment, but it’s all connected in some way to the pieces you see lit up on the jigsaw.

I should clarify what I mean here by “art” since people are always wanting to clarify what art is, and if a particular thing qualifies as art (I feel if you’re asking if it’s art then it’s art). By art I mean anything that has needed a creative action for it to be created. A book is art because in its DNA is the person who wrote it, while the printers that print out the book, mechanically inking out each page, are not artists. So yes, all movies, music, video games, paintings, sculptures, fashion etc. are art, but so are a much wider array of things. Giving a presentation, even socialising or talking to others, there can be an art to doing these things, a personal flourish is needed, and thus they are an art. A social worker is an artist in how they help (or don’t help) others, the perspectives they take and the way they go about their work. Life itself is an art.