Which is more important: life or art?
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - LIFES BIG QUESTIONS
“If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat… you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It’s just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It’s just to destroy life.” —Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, 1992
Do we deny life when we only live for art?
:: cat curator by mark williams
Art is a wonderful means of escape, in all its various forms. Sometimes we can become so absorbed in our mental paradise that we tune out reality, but I'm not certain that qualifies for denying life, just a different perspective on it.
i've always thought of art as a way to escape. to leave all your cares and worries behind for awhile. so when one lives for art, i see it as an attempt to escape completely from life.
I think the the question inherently assumes that the can cannot save itself. You are not given a scenario... it is a value based question in my opinion, making the assumption that if one thing is saved, the other is not.
I think there is something simultaneously reflective (which maybe is not an actively "living" activity) and creative (which is) about being creative and creating art.
I also think that there is also something kind of parasitic about some forms of art - how artists sometimes (often?) use a lot of their real-life experience for their art, and often transform it along the way. (I wouldn't necessarily call this denying life, though.) I also don't think that makes art bad. I'm down with art.
What I think is more problematic than people "living for art" is people "living the way they think artists should live". This is also the image that springs to mind when I think of someone saying that they "live only for art". My main problem with this is that it seems to be based on the following assuption: that "acting artistically" (drinking wine, having spurious relationships with many different people, and wearing adorable little black turtlenecks--or whatever happens to be fashionable at the moment) leads directly to art. Talent, skill, practice and lots of hard work leads to successful art.
(I just read a book about people who tried to act "artistically" and be around artistic people all the time and it was kind of about this sort of thing. Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates, who wrote Revolutionary Road. Good book.)
Yeah, this is simple. Art is the expression of a concept or idea. All concepts or ideas trace back to the values we hold for ourselves, the ultimate of all values which is life. Art is a derivative of life, way down the line. Moments of life themselves can be art as well.
- LIFE's BIG QUESTIONS
- ATTACK A CHALLENGE
I think that life sometimes is art. When I look out into the sky and see the stars, or look into the eyes of my girl, that is seeing art through life.