This is a response to this blog entry by a correspondent of mine, Andrew, who reviews movies on YouTube. The question at hand: what is art? I won’t summarise the whole thing – you can read it for yourselves; it’s not long – but I do want to respond to his conclusion because I think that the question is inherently fascinating, and that the way you answer it probably says a lot about you as a person. And, naturally, I’ll talk about Pokémon for a little bit at the end, because I can turn absolutely anything into a conversation about Pokémon. Just watch me.
There are a lot of things in the world which we call ‘art’ – painting, sculpture, jewellery, architecture, landscaping, et cetera; Andrew mentioned martial arts, which shows just how broad a word it is in modern usage. The Latin word ars, which is where our word ‘art’ comes from, just means ‘skill’ (according to Lewis & Short’s lexicon, it can refer to “any physical or mental ability, so far as it is practically exhibited,” which gives you some idea of where the incredible range of meaning it has in English comes from). There are plenty of skills we wouldn’t think of as art, though: I possess a number of skills relating to the correct use of lab equipment, which I learned in the course of studying for my chemistry degree, but I don’t think anyone would say that this makes me an ‘artist.’ Many other skills would be considered art if honed to a more ‘refined’ state: the ability to speak English does not constitute art, but people might take your claims seriously if you can write a particularly captivating piece of English prose, or give an especially stirring speech. Andrew suggests that an artist is anyone with a new and revolutionary point to what they’re doing, anyone who feels that they can change the way their skill is viewed and practiced; moreover, he suggests that technical skill doesn’t actually make a person an artist unless they also possess this drive to contribute something.
It’s a perfectly reasonable way of looking at the issue, and I fundamentally disagree with it because that’s just how crazy the question is at its most basic level.
I think it’s generally assumed that art is about creativity. People might argue for hours about what is and isn’t art, and what characteristics make a good artist, and whether you can become an artist or have to be born one, and so on and so forth, but one thing that you can probably say without fear of contradiction is that art demands creativity, that artists are people who do things that are new, innovative and different, which is part of what Andrew is getting at in his article. I’m going to argue that while, yes, artists are often creative people, creativity and originality actually aren’t central or even necessary to art.
No, I will not write a sane article for once. That’s just not how I roll.
Like so much else I believe, this comes back – in part, anyway – to Latin and Greek. In the Western world we tend to think of ourselves as the inheritors of the Greeks and Romans, but in some ways our conception of ‘art’ is quite different to theirs, and the difference, I think, is summed up by the Latin word imitatio. Imitatio is, of course, where our word ‘imitation’ comes from, and it describes the literary practice of borrowing ideas, figures of speech, and expressions from earlier authors and improving on them. For instance, in the final book of the Aeneid (the great national epic of Rome), Virgil compares the Italian prince Turnus to a proud lion who commits to battle only after being wounded by a hunter’s spear, because that’s exactly the same simile Homer used to describe Achilles in the twentieth book of the Iliad. It’s not that he thinks he can get away with it because people won’t know the Iliad; he assumes that people will know the earlier poem and wants them to have Achilles and Hector in mind when they think of Turnus and Aeneas. He leaves out the last line, “whether he slay some man or himself be slain,” but anyone who gets the reference will be thinking it. He also adds a little detail – the hunters in Virgil’s simile are Carthaginians, which makes readers recall Aeneas’ disastrous romance with the Carthaginian queen, Dido, earlier in the poem. The basic idea is straight from Homer, but Virgil plays with it to reward readers who know the original and to show how clever he is. To jump to a totally different art form, no one really ‘does’ completely original scenes in Greek vase painting. They think about all the pots they’ve ever seen that depicted the same story, or a similar one, and generally show all the same characters in the same positions with the same iconography (how would people recognise the scene if you changed everything?) but they’ll change a little bit here and there, maybe add some neat new details, to play with the conventions and show off their technical skill. Scenes that are legitimately new are extremely rare. This is what classicists mean by ‘working in a tradition’ – everyone is consciously thinking about the other artists who have done the same thing in the past, and deliberately responding to those previous versions.
The practical upshot of all this is that Greek and Roman art does not place much emphasis on ‘originality.’ They don’t look for new ideas, because they believe that all the best ideas have been used already; instead they look for cleverer ways of using old ideas. This is not to say that they aren’t creative, it’s that doing something new isn’t the point. The point is to appreciate and respond to older art and demonstrate how well you understand it. Anyway, I didn’t bring this up just to bore you all to tears by talking about classics (that is merely an incidental bonus). I brought this up because I think it’s still relevant to the way people deal with art now. No-one creates art in a vacuum. All art is influenced by what we’ve seen in the past; it’s really not easy to find an example of art that isn’t either imitating or consciously refuting what exists already. If you’re painting, for instance, even your choice of a particular style is going to be influenced by the works you’ve seen in that style and, based on that, what you think its strengths are. You’re also going to be aware that there are things people paint, like faces, and landscapes, and still-lifes, and what-have-you, and even if you don’t pick one of those, you’ll probably paint something you can actually see, or something you can imagine as similar to what you can see. You’ve never seen a dragon, for instance, but you’ve probably seen things with scales, things with horns, things with leathery wings, and so on, and you know what all of those are supposed to look like. If – to jump, again, to a completely different art form – you’re writing a story, you probably aren’t going to say “I want to be original, so I won’t have a hero, or a villain, or a romance, or a mystery; those things have been done.” You might try to write a villain who’s different to every other villain before him, but as you do so, you’ll be aware of those other villains and challenging your readers to compare them with yours. This is not a bad thing; even originality is only original when viewed against its predecessors. No-one creates art without some kind of model. The trick is in how you choose and combine your models, and the technical skill involved in splicing together the existing ideas.
The point I am by degrees trying to construct here is that art is not actually about creation at all. Art is about perception. Art is the process by which we identify what makes something interesting, poignant or beautiful, and exalt it – and, naturally, that process involves the audience too, who will be participating in that art to a greater or lesser degree. When you decide to paint something no-one else has ever painted before, you are recognising it as a subject worthy of appreciation. When you decide to write a character with a personality no-one has ever written about before, you are recognising that as an aspect of humanity worthy of exploration. When you create one piece of art that, in some way, recalls another, you are identifying what makes that original piece worth noticing, playing with it, and showing your audience how it can be used. In some cases, the conclusions you draw will be totally bizarre and most right-minded people will have absolutely no idea what you’re on about, which I think is what happens a lot with ‘modern art,’ like Kazimir Malevitch’s Black Square. It’s… well, a black square. When Malevitch painted a black square, painters had for decades been breaking down paintings into more and more basic components, through pointillism and impressionism to cubism and the like; taken in that context, the black square is a response to all that earlier work, saying “okay guys, that’s it; we’re done.” No-one listened, of course. Another example of ‘modern art,’ one which Andrew brought up in his entry, is this unmade bed. Not a painting of an unmade bed, you understand, the actual unmade bed. The ‘art,’ obviously, is not in creating the unmade bed; any university student can do that. The ‘art’ is in the artist’s perception of what the bed can be taken to mean – an insight into the life of the person who slept in it – and her deliberate choice to share that perception with the world.
(Personally I still think it’s a bit weird, though.)
All of this, of course, is the ultimate vindication of fan art and fan fiction as art that participates in and celebrates existing art (I mean, when it gets right down to it, Virgil’s Aeneid is a Homer fanfic – possibly the greatest fanfic of all time), which if I’m not mistaken will be of great relevance to a lot of my regular readers. Pokémon fan art and fan fiction explain, emphasise, develop and share your own experience of the Pokémon universe. They show what you think is important, and why, and they respond to the world we’ve been given, and I think that in itself makes them inherently interesting (yes, even the really bad stuff, provided you can actually stomach it). The wonderful thing about all this is that we’re all fascinated and enthralled by different things. You might love a Pokémon that I can’t stand; maybe that’s because we’re focussing on different aspects of the design? Maybe something in its physical form or its abilities reminded you of some other creature, or person, or place, or time, and you’ve always connected the two in your mind. If you happen to have a talent for drawing or writing, you can bring out those aspects that are so important to your perception and share them with others – and that makes all Pokémon more awesome for everyone.
As for me? Well, this blog is all about my experience and my interpretation of Pokémon. My perception highlights ethics, philosophy, culture and history, and those are the things I think about constantly as I play the games or watch the show. I’m here to share that perception with you, as I do when I talk about mad things like what Pokémon gender really means, or whether the ethics of Pokémon training present a viable moral framework. Does that make me an artist? I guess if I accept my own arguments, it must do.
Discuss.
Pokémaniacal 