Notebook Words

These are the things I write down in my notebook from time to time. They are tiny abstracts on various subjects. Sometimes they are a few sentences long, sometimes not even that long. Occasionally one will be a paragraph or so. None of these really seem to fit anywhere else, so I decided to create a page specifically for them.

"Art"

The things we learn to do in art class are not the ways of art, despite what our teachers say. As Blake put it, any man with two eyes in his head can do what we are doing; such is the purpose of these classes. But what truly makes art cannot be learned in any classroom. To make art, one must have a "big idea." This amounts to magic.

My college art teacher kept telling me how this one piano company had such great products and their motto was something like, "If a machine can do something with any degree of skill, let the machine do it."
Well, I'd say that a combination of camera, Xerox machine and/or scanner makes for a highly accurate image of an object. So why do we bother to duplicate them by hand?

I'm not sure what my teacher means by taking a drawing "further" but I have an analogy that may fit: Imagine the drawing as a tangible form of the entire sexual act. If you don't take it far enough, it's stuck at that point just before orgasm. To "take it further" is to let it come, and the viewer is suddenly overwhelmed. Great art has to get the viewer off.

Many inferior artists use gimicks such as ridiculous size to catch the viewer's attention. This a kind of fake orgasm, and rarely do the unexperienced recognize the lie.

Art evolves from the idea of reveling in something wonderful; of making love to something with the eye. On a lower plain, pornography appeals to this desire. Pornography and art go hand-in-hand; a move in one creates a move in the other.

Art classes take up far too much time that I could be using for creating real art. Wouldn't it be better to study something else and spend as much of my free time as possible making art?

Art and philosophy are functions of boredom.

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