My girlfriend's mom has a Canon Rebel which never leaves her side (or, rather, stomach). It mostly documents the important moments in her daughter's lives, and contains more pictures of said moments than there were actually moments. (She applies burst mode liberally.)
My brother has a big fancy Nikon with all the lenses, filters, buttons, bells and whistles you could ask for. (But apparently not all HE could ask for.) He carries it around in a forty pound bag, and uses it to document anything but people. Buffalo, trees, interesting sunsets, anything he sees.
I have a camera now, too. It just came from Ebay, and will document all kinds of things once it has a memory card. Interesting things, I hope.
I used to think photography was a silly passtime, attracting people through the sole virtue that an 18-45 mm lens is the thickest rim you can fit around your glasses. It was the purview of introverted art students, the refuge of people that didn't do things worth photographing.
But now I have a camera.
Why do I have a camera? To document interesting things.
This is a girl named Hannah F. She's an art student.
I thought she was interesting, so I documented her.
I asked first.
Big Question: What Single Activity Defines "Art"?
Pizarro and Picasso
Pizarro was a conquistador, which means he went places and conquered them vigorously. His job was to sail to uncivilized parts of the world and civilize them the Spanish way before those dratted Portuguese got there. He was to find land and gold for Spain and kill any interfering indigenous. He went places no man had gone and brought back things no man had seen: sculptures, monkeys, Incas, all sorts of interesting fare.
Picasso was a cubist, which means he saw things and painted them wrong. His job was to paint portraits with scrambled faces and illustrate atrocities through the monochromatic deformed people and agonized horse triangles. He was to find shapes and colors and was authorized to disregard trivialities like proper proportion and realism. He painted things no man had painted before, and showed people what they hadn't seen.
This is Guernica, by Picasso, courtesy of www.pablopicasso.org.
If asked for one single activity with which to define "art", there would be as many answers as answerers. Expressing emotion, teaching truth, displaying pleasing images, all these are valid, and there is certainly some art which does all these.
But what works do which? I saw a video in the Art Institute of Chicago in which the artist (whose name escapes me) filmed himself in bust painting himself black. At the Indianapolis Museum of Art, there's currently an installation consisting of a string nailed to the floor and taped to a window. No explanation, no reason is given.
What emotion does this video express? You could argue that it makes a racial statement, that it expresses a desire of the artist to reflect his soul on his skin, that it inverts common images, where the dark color of the subject causes him to lose clarity as he applies more and more paint. The string could be an expression of hope and rising, or entrapment and falling down.
I believe that the purpose is simply this: That if the artist hadn't done this, nobody else would have.
Because Art is exploration.
Art can be finding new perspectives.
For example, this is how my friend Michael Abshier sees the world.
Art is...
In the Art Institute of Chicago, there's several pieces where an artist paints models. Most of them actually look like the models. But one particularly stuck out to me because the artist literally painted the models, then rolled them on the canvas. I wondered, "why would he do this?" This gives him a reason.
Painting women and rolling them around was his New World: A place nobody had been, and in fact he probably discovered by accident. Being an artist, he realized his job: To explore this world and bring back the prize gems he found there.
Picasso explored a world where people were angular and their eye were on their chins.
Spielberg explored a world where aliens healed by touching and loved Reeses Pieces.
Pollock rode a hedgehog through a world made entirely of paint-filled balloons.
Lots of modern art seems to be focused on exploring, not the natural world as artists classically have, but worlds designed by the process by which the art is made: rolling people, throwing paint, hammering nails, even now including everyday touchscreen tasks and retweeting patterns. (For more cool stuff, check this out. Kinda mind blowing.)
I'd like to end by complaining. I don't think that people are judicious in their choices in what to bring back. Modern art has become the equivalent of a National Geographic photographer returning from Nepal with the a hard drive full of pictures of the airport. Everybody can paint, everybody can take photographs, but not everybody is an artist.
But I'm pretty sure everyone can be.
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