What Is Art, again?

Maybe the above question is something we ought to ask often if only to highlight the attendant difficulties and uneasy confusion people encounter when trying to define what art is. The oft-quoted cliché that beauty is in the eye of the beholder could apply also in judging what art is, whether serious, pop, or whatever.

This untended difficulty reared its head during the last entry on my poster collection of Norman P. Rockwell works. Many critics had panned Rockwell’s works by denying him the honor of considering his work as serious art; instead that he was simply an illustrator however gifted he was as such.

And I always have a problem with such restrictive delineation because my mind has not really been able to grasp the exact parameters of what serious art really is. Should one rely strictly on the judgments of the art critics? But don’t they disagree amongst themselves? And many would go further and decry the lack of objectivity or relevance in many admired critics.

Anyway, I am not making this orphaned confusion my personal problem, because I simply follow my gut feelings and try to work up good feelings about the works that appeal to what I could consider my sense of what is beautiful, tasteful, or extraordinary.

To reveal somewhat what could be considered works that I value and keep, presented hereunder are several works which currently hang around the house.

The first one hangs almost unnoticed in the garage. Now, this is so simply because the interior of the house is already littered to capacity with other odd stuff. Anyway, it is clearly an oil painting of the Last Supper of Christ, but quite coarse and rudimentary if I may be forgiven in saying so. It appears to have been created from an art-by-the-numbers kit, the actual execution of which may not have been perfectly faithful to accompanying instructions (depth in the ceiling appears like an optical illusion image). But it is reasonably valued and loved by us because it came from a dearly departed widow who was very close to the wife. The same widow who gifted us with the antique furniture, subject of an earlier blog entry. According to her, it was meticulously created by her late husband who was quite an eclectic handyman around the house. Thus, it will be part of our house and will be reasonably cared for and treasured as work of art.

The next one hangs in one of the guest rooms and is accented with a wall clock underneath it. The subject is the same, the Last Supper of Christ. However, it is not painted. It is woven into a fabric. It was gifted to the wife by some client in the bank she worked. For my part, I got me an old wooden frame, sanded and spruced it up. Then installed the fabric tightly to the inner frame. I consider it unique because the intricate image is woven into the fabric, thus I treasure it and again consider it a valued work of art.

The third one, or actually nine of them, is similar in that the images are woven into the fabric and all have Japanese motif, most prominent of which are the ones with holy and majestic Mount Fuji . I have already framed six of them and two of them hang close to the stair landing.

Now, the last two could not be considered ones of a kind, or maybe even originals because one believes that somewhere there are templates used to “manufacture” these works. Still I again treasure them and consider them truly works of art.

So there, I have answered the question above, based entirely on my own personal perception and judgment. The extraordinary ingenuity, the dogged determination to creatively produce something, and indeed, the uniqueness of the works, all played in setting my own standards.

And I end with this narrative which came from a news item I read in one of the national papers many years ago.

Some staid museum in New York (or was it elitist Boston?) had reported this rather unusual account about an abstract painting that it dearly treasured. It was a huge framed painting by some noted painter about an abstract subject. It had been prominently ensconced in an equally prominent and huge wall of the museum that was always well-visited and admired. A stenciled metal plate had a few statements about the painting, what it signified and its artistic highlights.

Anyway, after many years the solicitous keepers of the museum decided it was time to spruce up that part of the museum. Plans called for cleaning the painting and frame and repainting the huge backdrop of a wall.

But when the huge painting was carefully lowered down, a surprising revelation. At the back, the painter had handwritten some data and instructions about the painting, specifically about how it was to be hung. Surprise of surprises, the museum had been hanging the painting upside down all these years.

Moral of the story. Art and its appreciation are in the eye of the beholder.

How else to explain the above faux pas, where no viewer, whether learned or not, noticed that “the book was being read upside down”.

Here's a couple more of my keepers this time coming from my unworthy hands: