BIG,DEEP art question.

Yes, art is subjective but…
“Good” art is usually a unique way of seeing. Subtle or overt. Van Gough saw things differently, but he was “crazy” (and he drank his thinner). I’ve read documentation (sorry, no cites!) about corralations between artist (writers, musicians,etc) and substance abuse and/or “melencholy”/depression/other mental problems. Lennon (John) wrote “looking through a glass onion”. That’s very cool. And artistic! But I was at a random sentence generater site once that could spit stuff like that out endlessly. Was it “art”? No. No soul. But it could be indestinguishable without the knowledge of it’s origin. Lennon was also known to experiment with drugs.
Do you see where I’m going? Is “good” art just a distorted view of reality as seen by sober folks? I’m not stating this well, but in other words - Would we have ever heard of Hemingway if he had never taken a drink in his life?

i can’t answer any questions about whether lennon would have written what he did had he not dosed, or whether hemmingway could have produced “The Old Man and The Sea” if he hadn’t been on the sauce. but i can say that drug use is/can be very important to art.

the main problem with your question is that you are looking at art, and relaizing that a good percentage of artists were crazy or drug users. however, if you looked everybody, you’d see that there are a lot of people who are insane or addicts, who don’t produce a lick of art. so you’ve thrown yourself a whammy.

now, as for art being a ‘distorted’ view of reality, i’d say that you are close but semantics are in the way. sure, you could call it distorted, but ‘specific’ or ‘personal’ work much better. the artist is showing the world what he or she thinks, and how they think. good art connects a few different ideas that were not considered that connected.

now, do drugs help with that? damn straight. will drugs cause a regular schmo to become van gogh? i think not. but drugs can open up one’s horizon, and give the brain some breathing time to connect the dots. so my advice to you is, if you are going to become an artist, try drugs. not all of them. just some of them. and while you are tripping face, paint paint paint!

Oh please. If you want to use drugs, use drugs. I can’t stop you. But drugs are not a “tool” to be a good artist. You have to work at being a good artist.

Some people have produced good art while high, but that was just part of their personality. It worked for them. It will not work for everyone. Frankly, I doubt it “works” as much as people want to convince themselves it does. I think some people are geniuses and can work through a drug-induced fog better than others. Or are brilliant enough to find a way to make it work for them. Others don’t. They just veg out and produce what one of my art teachers called “stool smearing” - they are being “creative” and “expressing themselves”, but no one else can relate to it. There is no coherency, no skill, no way to relate to the viewer. More people just quit doing art altogether, and become losers. No, I don’t think drugs help the creative process all that often. I think that a high percentage of the time, they hinder. But he hear about a few extreme examples of how some genius produced this or that art work while high, and think that the drugs were the reason. Doubtful.

I went to a major art school in LA, in the 80s. Drug use was everywhere. Sometimes even the teachers. I never was overwhelmingly impressed by my drugged-out bretheren. There seemed to be no correlation between drug use and brilliance. Some artists were lazy, and wanted to zone out and play the game of being “arty”, without having to WORK at it. Others WORKED at it. Meaning - studying, filling sketchbooks, experimenting with new techniques, listening to and taking criticism to heart. WORK WORK WORK. And drugs may or may not have been part of their lifestyle. I WORKED at being a good artist, never took any drugs. I never felt like my work suffered, I got plenty of respect from my peers. Most of the people I know who I consider to be brilliant artists do not use drugs.

Van Gogh was a brilliant artist because he worked like a dog. He was also unbalanced. (Frankly, so am I, but that is a different story! :wink: ) But the point is, he worked hard, he tried SO hard.

Drugs are not the answer, and are not an important element to good art, IMHO. Dedication, hard work, and not giving up on your vision are primary elements.

      • Van Gogh was unbalanced; as were many other “landmark” (usually modern) artists. Oliver Sacks hit upon this in one of his books, in a particular chapter about a man with a degenerative brain condition who also paints. Arranging the paintings chronologically, it is easy to see the early realist/figurative paintings gradually change to completely abstract work. I seem to recall a couple magazine articles about the same subject (mental degeneration of artists). - This doesn’t mean that Van Gogh wasn’t talented; just that at least part of his radical perception was a result of degenerative brain conditions, and those same patterns of painting are often exhibited in other people who suffer the same conditions. - MC

Hmmm, I’m not sure about the drug thing. I’ve heard of artists that take drugs but not a large enough percentage to warrant any conclusions. This reminds me of a discussion I heard about Absynthe (sp?) though. Supposedly some artists swear by the stuff. However, saying that drugs are important to art just seems asinine to me. Sure it can open your horizon, but so can sky diving or seeing the world. Some artists have produced interesting work with drugs, but even Absynthe is supposed to limit your creativity after prolonged use.
Though, I believe the reasons proposed for why Van Gogh was the way he was, was that he suffered from depression or he was unaware of the lead in his paint (due to never going to art school), which led to depression.
Anyway, the depression part is what I wanted to talk about more. I just saw a show on depression in artists. Supposedly, according to this show, there’s a correlation between artistry and depression. Just for the record it was on Much Music and the show was The New Music. Check out http://www.thenewmusic.net/nmtranscripts/ and look under NM13-827 for the transcript. Here’s what the doctor said;
Dr. Wong: I THINK THAT THROUGHOUT HISTORY THERE HAVE BEEN BOTH BIOGRAPHICAL AND ANECDOTAL ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN MADNESS, SUICIDE AND ARTISTIC CREATIVITY AND I DON’T KNOW THAT IT’S ANY DIFFERENT NOW THAN IT HAS BEEN IN THE PAST.

Check out the rest of the transcript, very interesting stuff on messages in music and depression.
I don’t know whether I would agree with this right off, but it seems to me that many depressed people have found release in art. Take Van Gogh, whose letters revealed that he was literally painting for his life. If he hadn’t had art, he would have been dead much sooner. I’m not exactly a fan, but Kurt Cobain might also fit into this category. The fact that people think of it as great art is not surprising. These are people that are bearing their tormented souls, and their art is very truthful.
That’s why that’s art and the computer’s word games are not necessarily the same. Art comes from the soul.
On another note, about art being subjective, I am reminded of an art prof I had. He said, “It shouldn’t be I don’t know art, but I know what I like, it should be I don’t know art, but I like what I know.”
People tend to think something’s good when it fits into their already founded definition of what is good. That’s why some of the most popular art today, took twenties years to become popular. Revolutionary art is quite often disliked when it first comes out. If I’m not mistaken, Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life-time.

There is a fairly well documented connection between Bipolar disorder (aka Manic Depressive disorder) and creativity. An excellent book on the subject is Dr.Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Touched with Fire: Manic-depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament”.

I don’t know whether or not drugs actually do have any actual correlation to ones creative output but there have been artists and thinkers in the past who have used hallucinogenics to enhance their creativity. Aldous Huxley, for example tended to use mescalin and then he wrote about his experiences (I don’t have a cite but he wrote a book called *** The Doors of Perception *** about one particular drug taking experience). D.H. Lawrence allegedly used drugs as well in the belief that it would enhance his creativity. Whether they do work or not is something I wouldn’t know (having never tried hallucinogenics) but the Huxley and Lawrence certainly were very creative, so perhaps there’s something in it.

Drug-enhanced or not, a particular frame of mind is essential to the creative process, and a number of artists have special places/studios to go where they can enter this mindset.

Something about the Van Gogh analogy reminded of the example of abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. In his later years, he developed Alzheimers but was still producing work. There was debate in the art fraternity as to whether he was consciously creating new art or not. Some suggested that he didn’t consciously know what he was doing, just going through the motions.

So, the question that rises from this is, if good work can be produced by an artist in a certain frame of mind, does that make work produced by the same person in a perceptibly different frame of mind bad?

Aargh! Damnable italics!

That question again, properly italicised:

If good work can be produced by an artist in a certain frame of mind, does that make work produced by the same person in a perceptibly different frame of mind bad?

The only answer to this debate is an entirely seamless tautology: it is what it is.

If you believe in God, then you live in a universe in which there is a God. If you don’t believe in God, then you live in a godless world.

Everything in the experience of an artist–good artist or bad–adds up to the consciousness that is that artist. If you’re an artist who takes drugs, then those drugs have an effect on your art. Whether the effect is good or bad is entirely subjective: it’s good if someone thinks it’s good, and it can be bad at the same time to someone who thinks it’s bad. Similary, if you’re an artist who does NOT take drugs, that is part of your experience as well.

Whether “drugs” enhance or impair your creativity is a nonsensical question: “drugs” has no meaning in a clinical sense; it’s a social concept.

Whether a specific drug enhances or impairs in another question.

The implication of the OPs question seems to be: Is art that is eventually judged by society at large to be important–art that reaches a wide audience and can be seen to have an effect on art that comes after it–more likely to be produced by a mind that’s “abnormal.” Drugs, mental illness: aberrations of the brain.

I don’t think the effects of these factors can be discounted, but I wonder a bit at the frequent impulse to single them out as if they were quantifiable ingredients in the recipe for a “real” artist. Perhaps because they’re more conducive to simple labels than the myriad other effects upon the mind of an artist. It’s much easier to try to break it down into one-word components: drugs, insanity, childhood. It would be much more difficult, though much closer to the truth, to try to see the entire fabric of experience that goes into an artist’s lifelong work of documenting his or her understanding of the world.

That being said, it takes a mind of great originality to make the great leaps made the great artists of past. Great art, as opposed to good art (both of these being entirely artificial, social projections without empirical sense) is a new thought: a new language: a new form of illumination. Those leaps are not as likely to be made by people who carefully guard their minds from new experiences, it seems to me, as by people who are constantly willing to look at things from a different angle: reinventors of the wheel; the little boy who saw the emperor’s nakedness through the self-protective veil of society.

But outsiders of any kind are more likely to see the world through a unique lens, not just chemical or mental outsiders. Social outsiders as well. As a gay man, I realized growing up that if I was to see myself as a whole, worthy human being, I would have to reject some of the fundamental teachings of this society. This taught me, of course, that those fundaments were vulnerable to rejection, and predisposed me to question the general rules; not to be afraid to examine them for further weaknesses. Society creates its own iconoclasts.

Looks like that got away from me; I had not intention of getting that convoluted. I meant, I think, simply that, yes, those factors influence an artist’s perceptions and expression, but no more than the artist’s other experiences. But insofar as those experiences contribute to the artist’s self-perception as an outsider, as someone not entirely dependent upon societies defintions of existence, they have perhaps more influence on an artist than other experiences.

Verbaceously (new word!) yours,

Thanks for the input. I was rushed when I posted so there are some semantics problems.
For the record, I am an artist. Fairly successful. But it drives me crazy to have to paint what most people want. I know I don’t have to. I could paint from my “soul”, die penniless and be famous 50 yrs from now but I have a responsibility to my daughter so I ‘sell out’, paint for the masses and make the bills.
I don’t use drugs anymore, but I used to drink quite a bit and turned out some good stuff then.
I’m not looking for a shortcut. I’m just wondering if there is such a thing as good art? Or more to the point -Art? I guess I’m more the tormented soul type. Or maybe I’m frustrated at the tiny, tiny fraction of the population who can appreciate my ‘good’ art.

Is there really a difference between computer-generated art, and art created by a brain that’s that’s not functioning soberly? Think .

Again, thanks for the cites.

<minor hijack>
A few years back I attended a lecture by an artist who had programmed a computer to paint (I wish I could remember his name). The paintings were quite good, for a computer. It had a sense of color and composition, the brush strokes looked natural, etc. Probably better than what I could do without a model in front of me. His question to us, the audience, was is what the computer does art? The computer scientist half of the room (including myself) said, yup, you bet. Looks like art, must be art. The artist half of the room said theres no creativity there. The lecturer said that while the paintings are arguably art, the important thing was the program that the artist created, and the ideas embodied in the program; that was the art.

Then one of the computer scientists said “Well, what if the program could make Van Goghs. What if it made them so well, that you couldn’t tell a computer generated Van Gogh from a real one?” The lecturers answer was different this time. He that no, those paintings are not art. It’s not that they aren’t creative, but because they’ve been done already. The world has seen Van Gogh, and learned what we could from him. To be real capital A Art, there have to be some new ideas present in the work, something no one has seen before, and no current computer program is capable of that.
</minor hijack>

So, point is, a non-sober person can still have creative insight that computers can’t.

I’m still mulling over the whole drug use thing. I suspect, just talkin out my ass here, that it may lead to some creative new ideas, but unless you have the technique and single-mindedness to carry those ideas out without getting distracted, then it’ll still be bad art.

I was just discussing this over on MPSIMS and just saw this thread.

Although this is not what I said over there here is my take on the issue of art as a whole.

Art is an expression of the being or the soul. Be it words or paintings, photographs, clay, song, etc. What comes out to me is a part of one’s person that the world really never sees in such great detail.

In early ages pictures were a way to tell the story of a hunt or a tragedy that happened in the life of the people. It was symbolic of who they were. I think as we grew and became more evolved art split off to focus on the inner self of the artist.

There was and still is spiritual interpretation to art but for many modern artists it is a feeling or thought in time maybe.

Drugs, depression or whatever may or may not not be a part of art. But the sentiment is still there. Even a computer artist can create art as I have seen many beautiful as well as dreadful digital paintings in my graphics message boards. But true art is inspired, I think, by something inside. There is room for interpretation by those that view it.

In commercial art, there is little interpretation. It is there to convey a feeling that the general population may feel, that is the intent. Creative art on the other hand is there to give each individual a unique view or to discard it as useless.

Art, in its truest sense, works on the emotions and not the intellect. I think each artist wants you to see some of the picture, but rarely all. These are parts of the soul that are showing through but just enough for you to have a sense of who he or she is.

Art does not mean critics or bylines in a newspaper to me, it means emotion and life.

Nah. Isn’t really. I see you’ve fallen for the big joke too.

Actually art is just a buncha stuff, and for some reason people get all worked up over it. Probably way too much. And half the so-called genius artists out there are doing it for the money, most artists think the art-consumers are ignorant fools so are laughing all the way to the bank, while the rest of the artists are fooling themselves.

:smiley:

It’s true folks, it’s nothing important really. It’s just a buncha stuff. Admit it.

GuanoLad,

Then tell me what is art to you?

Careful I am on the heals of debating :wink:

I think Guanolad is closer thn you might think!

      • Modern art is an attempt to escape unfavorable comparisons by not resembling anything. - MC