To kick off a few days of activities we visited an art gallery, which has a surrealism exhibition currently. Smallsteps enjoys the trips to the museums and galleries a lot, but is still unsure of what she lies and doesn't. A lot of the surrealist stuff today, she didn't like, as it was too weird, and maybe a little "scary" due to it being so unfamiliar, or the mix of subject matters and images might have been unsettling - which is of course, part of the point of surrealism. It is a bride between the conscious and subconscious. Between waking life, and the dream world.
A lot of the surrealist work doesn't really call to me either though, because it is too messy and unstructured, and I feel a lot of it is not so much art, but just a jumble of images and media to resemble something profound, but actually devoid of profundity. Some of it on the other hand, can be very well put together and actually illicit deeper thought.
Of course it can be that I am just not smart enough to get it, or patient enough to spend the time needed to get it. But, a lot of it is rather juvenile, but at least the older work has to be looked through the lens of the time, not the perspective of today, because what was pushing the boundaries of perception a hundred years ago, might seem utterly mundane today.
Like Smallsteps' leg poking through a hole in a board. They had positioned it low down, to make it difficult for those interested in putting on a different kind of show. The animation we watched above was also largely created by artificial intelligence, and while it might look impressive, there is very little value in the art of it in my opinion, because there is very little thought behind it and, very little personal input. Stealing a thousand images from other artists, sticking them into some kind of montage and looping them, isn't high-end creativity.
The other thing with surrealism is that the majority of work is sexual in nature, which perhaps speaks to the Oscar Wilde quote of "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power." Freud would have had a bit to say about a lot of the artists, since much of the creativity comes down to what kind of every day object can be turned into a pair of tits, a dick, or a pussy.
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
But I do think that because the idea of surrealism is to explore the dream world devoid of the constraints of morality, much of it looks into deepest and darkest desires, even if only in fantasy alone. And as such, much of the tone of surrealist work is in the negative, the dystopic, the bizarre, and often the abhorrent. It pushes the line of common sensibilities to uncover what lays beneath - what we want to hide away from the view of others.
There is no trophy for creativity in this pile.
Yet some will read into this and derive a meaning, as if there is something grand thought hidden among the haphazard mess piled on the floor. And that is what it comes down to, because while beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is art. I think art only becomes art when it has an audience, and then it is up to the viewer to decide on whether they see it as artful, or artempty.
Who am I to say what is art in another's eyes?
I can only judge for myself, and in so doing, judge myself. The way we see the world speaks to our experience, our opinion, our conditioning, our predisposed position. I have grown up around art all of my life in many different forms, but there is a big difference between what is creatively valuable, and what I am willing to hang upon my wall to enjoy.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
