Tasha Adison
203-321-7483
Sacred Heart Greenwich – 12th Grade
My name is Tasha Adison, I attend Sacred Heart in Greenwich, Connecticut. As the head of the diversity club I live to immerse myself in new cultures, and learn new ideas. Sacred Heart has taught me to challenge myself, and open my mind to new ideas. My first year in senior seminar has helped me expand my mind philosophically and tackle hard question that don’t even have answers yet. For the past three summers I’ve spent my time Volunteering at the Salvation Army, and Stamford Hospital. Along with being an everyday student, sports are also a big part of who I am. I participate on both the varsity volleyball, and varsity Track and Field team at my school.
We Are All Creators
Who are we to decide what art is. As humans we cannot define the true meaning of art or what is considered art. Art is anything created by someone whether it is in the form of music, paintings, drawings, dance, writing, etc, and different options appeal to different people in multiple ways. Anything that catches the eye either with the feeling of confusion, happiness, or sadness is the point of art. Art captures the mind of the viewer even if it was not the intended feeling the point is to feel something, to think about something. “Consequently, artistic experience cannot yield knowledge. Nor do the makers of artworks work from knowledge. Because artworks engage an unstable, lower part of the soul, art should be subservient to moral realities, which, along with truth, are more metaphysically fundamental and hence more humanly important than beauty.” (Adajian) Art is more than the object itself but the message it sends to the soul, and the empowerment it gives to the mid to think bigger than the object itself. Anything that is created is considered art, everything around us is art, and we are art. Art is up to the eyes of the viewer; we cannot make art finite because it is subjective to the viewer. Whether it was captivating to the eye, or questionable it made you think. The point is it got someone’s attention.
The famous saying, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” affirms that however we we see something and interpret it is one’s view and thoughts on the object that is analyzing art. Nowadays our sense of art is described as aesthetically pleasing, something that catches a unique person’s eye. In the MassMoCA when Sara and Mike see piles of sticks, a video of someone sitting in a chair repeatedly playing, and colorful abstract shapes, they seem to view these pieces as art. It is a tendency as humans who are limited to put limits on things around us. Because these pieces in the museum were not seen in the eye of these two as something “beautiful,” it was not art. Who is to say art is supposed to be beautiful. In the eyes of the artist, it is seen as one interpretation, but to everyone who walks past that work of art, there are millions of interpretations. Art is the difference between objectivity and subjectivity, meaning when one looks at a piece of work they have to separate the idea of it being considered “art” and pay attention to their own interpretation. The idea had before looking at a piece of creation is what holds one back from developing their own idea. Not only do we put limits on what is considered art, but how we define what art is. A common belief is that art is supposed to catch the eye as something beautiful. Something so different that it could have been created but only one person, this one work of art will captive all as beautiful. In a sense, this is right because art is captivating but captivating does not mean it always has to be appealing. Everyone has different tastes. I may look at this piece of are and say it is one of the most beautiful pieces of “art” I have seen, but to someone else it may be considered one of the ugliest things you have seen, so who is wrong? This is where we lose sense of what art is simply by using two words beautiful and ugly.
Plato’s cave shows that everything was a reflection the people in the cave saw was a reflection from the shadow of the cave. Everything we see, everything we do, and how we are based off of what we have been exposed to our entire life. Because a piece of art may not be something we are used to seeing or something that is not appealing to the eye, we automatically categorize it as not being art because of what we are conditioned to think. As humans, we tend to uncomfortable when exposed to something different that we are not used to and find it hard to adjust. Just like in Plato’s cave, the people are only exposed to images being projected in front of them. Leaving the cage would be something too difficult for their minds to grasp, just as we are so used to this idea of art being something aesthetically pleasing and if not it is not art, in Plato’s words, “…one who recognizes the existence of absolute beauty and is able to distinguish absolute beauty from the objects that participate in it, neither putting the objects in the place of absolute beauty nor absolute beauty in the place of the objects…” (Plato). The only way to understand the idea of true beauty as Plato says is to separate it from the object itself. “Beauty is not, for Plato, the distinctive province of the arts, and in fact his conception of beauty is extremely wide and metaphysical: there is a Form of Beauty, of which we can have non-perceptual knowledge, but it is more closely related to the erotic than to the arts.” (Adajian) We cannot explain beauty as Plato says therefore we cannot put a limit to what is considered beautiful. It is not about the object but the meaning behind the object, and what capture the mind. We trap ourselves in our own cave only exposed to our version of what the truth is and how we view things versus how they actually are. Humans are something that was created; we were made in the image of someone else. Therefore we are art, just like everything around us.
In our seminar study of epistemology, we discussed the facts that we cannot know the truth because our reality is based off of perception. We perceive things in the way we are used to seeing them. At the beginning of our course, we looked at an optical illusion, which I perceived as a line of logs. Looking at the optical illusion, the person standing on one side sees four logs whereas the person standing on the other side only sees three logs. Each person can only see their view of the logs therefore they cannot understand the view of the other person because they are only exposed to that one side. The two people interpreted the same thing differently, with different perceptions. They created their own idea of the image; their own interpretation that is what art is our own interpretation. We can all look at the picture differently and interpret it in a variety of ways and have many different perceptions as to what we see. So how can everyone together put a definition on what the meaning of art is if we cannot even see it the same. How can we put one label of beauty on the mind of multiple people? In a sense we are putting a limit of what we are saying someone can create based on our version of what beauty is considered in our eyes.
If we say that art cannot be categorized and everything created is art, therefore we are all artist, then why do we label specific people as artist if we all create. Just as we categorize what is considered art we also categorize who is considered an artist. We put artist on the same pedestal of what we consider art. If everything created is considered art then we are all artist. So art is simply what we create or what is created around us that is left to the interpretation of the view, so we are all artist.
Work Cited
Plato “The Republic.” Create. McGraw-Hill, 2016
Adajian, Thomas. "The Definition of Art." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 23 Oct. 2007. Web. 31 Jan. 2017.
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