That's Just Crazy Talk!
Any questions, comments or criticism can be emailed to info@misguidedspaces.com. Thank you for your interest. If we think your emails are constructive (or at least funny) we will happily post them on this page for the the benefit of the entire viewing audience (you can always pretend that includes more people than you). If you try any of the ideas posted on this web site, send some pictures and anecdotes about your experiences.
Oh, where your mind will wander when you don’t have cable.
I was channel surfing (even with the HD converter box, there are only about 18 channels, so it’s more like puddle jumping) and came across this reality TV show on ABC called “True Beauty”. It was a very shallow, sad show, beneath Cheryl Teigs in my opinion, but it got me thinking about art.
The show had an apparently esteemed plastic surgeon on it, who claimed he could classify how beautiful a person was using a mathematical formula. I found it funny that all these “beautiful” contestants were so aghast and amazed with this supposedly new concept.
The fact is, artists have been idealizing the human form in their work for as long as visual communication has existed. And society has dictated what that form will be for just as long. Because the only surviving representation of many past cultures is their art, we sometimes confuse the idealism with realism. It is important to keep in mind the difference.
There is no realism in art, in my opinion. Art is always distorted from its origin, no matter how “real” it seems. That’s why it’s “art”, and not “science” or “journalism”. Even most photography has an element of artistic license, be it in the lighting, or posing of the subject, or editing after the fact.
Early cultures, such as the Greeks, understood this without any pretence otherwise, and started the classical, over-the-top idealism we still admire today.
It’s not like the Greeks didn’t have bald, potbellied, misshapen people running around. It’s not like all women in the time of Titian were bodacious and rotund with perfect skin and tiny feet. Artists throughout time, whatever their convictions, have had to earn a living, and market their very subjective version of beauty to what their particular patrons would find appealing and acceptable.
Art is subjective because it needs to be. Life is, for the most part, a series of monotonous events, punctuated by joy and grief, here and there. We live our lives because we have to. We engage in art, positively or negatively, because we want to. The notion of art imitating life is nonsense. Life doesn’t imitate anything. And art really only imitates itself.
I wonder what people with 500 channels on TV think about.