Art and Suffering

[Stev]

You are correct I am cynical about everything including art. Though I do not believe, or maybe ,I do not want to believe I am being superficial. I just believe real poverty, and I don't mean the freedom, the fun poverty of a young artist sofa surfing, is to art what your mum sitting watching you and your girlfriend is to sex. It is not a rant against a class or a protest against the rich. I just believe, and so did Maslow, that certain things need to be in place in our lives before we can express our creativity.


sat today

[RichardH]

Art is a luxury for the few that have the time and freedom to perform/create it.

This would be the case for dabblers. Speaking from direct experience both as a self-taught artist with a 30 year career, and someone intimate with the art scene in my city. "Art" and art making is not a luxury, it can be for some, but not for a serious artist. In my case it was a calling from childhood, identical with, and an expression of, the deepest spiritual yearning, and the faculties associated with that. It is joy and it was no choice. It was not entered from a place of privilege, but literally from the gutter of homelessness. It gave life meaning and ended up providing dignity and livelihood. If anything it has been a middle class lifestyle with middle class financial pressures that have exhausted my creative impulse ... the pressure of success.

It may be pretentious to get too heavy about art, but it is also superficial and cynical to dismiss it as a cultural topping like whipped cream. At this point I don't care what people think...to be honest, but I do feel it should be said that serious (by serious I mean a deep long term discipline in skill development) art is not for anyone, and very rare... to be honest, very rare. The fact that much art is mediocre, and that there can be much self indulgent wanking put forward as "ART" should not stop people from looking into the serious, beautiful, and profound traditions from around the world.

Gassho.

Daizan

sat today

[Jishin]

Hi,

Art is a word.

Gassho, Jishin, _/st\_

[Stev]

Art is a luxury for the few that have the time and freedom to perform/create it. Yes we have paintings on cave walls but how many?, Just a handful in the whole world. I live in a valley of what would have been a stone age village with many caves and a clean water source. Neanderthal man has been proved to have lived here yet there are no cave wall paintings here. I would hazard a guess for the amount of cave dwellers there may have been to the amount of cave paintings discovered we are speaking of a ratio of 100s of thousands to one. That is one artist in every over a hundred thousand cave dwellers, why would that be? Well life was very hard then.
We are lucky , we have the wealth and time and freedom to personally express our our creativity, it is a joy to do but though i do not completely agree with Maslow's hierarchy of needs he argues art (self actualisation) is the last thing we need !!
MaslowsHierarchyOfNeeds.svg.jpg

[Jinyo]

Lisa and Ansan - beautifully put.

Thank you

Gassho

Willow

Sat today

[Byokan]

Hi All,


Fascinating discussion. Ansan, I agree with you, you said it beautifully, art is communication. It’s not just a pastime of luxury. Ansan mentioned the cave paintings. This brings up the point that making art seems to be an elemental part of being human. Drawing pictures on cave walls of the animals and plants that are important to us, or telling the story of the hunt in a dance around the fire, or carving a stick into a fertility figure, or arranging rocks in a circle... We’ve been making art for a long time, across all cultures and circumstances. Art says, I was here in the world, look, listen, touch, let me share my impressions, my skills, my values, my fears, my hopes; connect with me. Art says, you are not the only one, you are never alone. We can connect across distance, across language barriers, and even across time.

Gassho
Lisa
sat today

Great post and wonderful discussion. This "subject" is one that has been deliberated throughout the ages and for my entire life. Questions such as "Is it Art" and "Is it useful" are all about talking, the next level down from communication. From my point of view, Art (with a big A) is communication of the highest form. Art is music, 2D and 3D and 4D visuals, dance, sculpture, literature... It is a creative, original and powerful communication that reaches everyone on different levels even if we live inside a cave with no outside human intervention, listening to Philip Glass or Freddie Mercury while admiring the cave paintings on the wall and writing a novel or autobiography or a poem. While dancing. Is Art necessary? Is communication necessary? Art is accidental and transcendent. Within the absolute, it is universal to all. For me, when I do art, I too do it for joy...especially for joy...for celebration, to communicate. Subject matter doesn't matter. We are all artists when we are honest, just like we are all buddhas (buddhas with a little b). Little begets big...sometime. I think we all should have a cup of tea and dance. My take on this? Yeah, it is not only necessary but crucial to our existence. How else would we have communicated with the artists at Lascaux?

Gassho
Ansan

SatToday

[Jinyo]

Thanks Risho - looks good

[Risho]

Total side topic and just in case you haven't heard of it --> check out Sky Above, Great Wind

[Byrne]

If anyone really wants to go off the deep end with zen and art read John Cage's Silence. I'm pretty sure he was more of a Rinzai guy.

Gassho

Sat Today

[alan.r]

That's strange Alan - I've just been reading 'One Robe One Bowl' this afternoon

Gassho

Willow

Sat today

Hi Willow. Nice! It's one of the few books I like to keep close at hand.

Gassho,
Alan
sattoday

[Jinyo]

Something like this to me:

"Who says my poems are poems?
These poems are not poems.
When you can understand this,
then we can begin to speak of poetry."

-Ryokan

Gassho,
Alan
sattoday

That's strange Alan - I've just been reading 'One Robe One Bowl' this afternoon

Gassho

Willow

Sat today

[Risho]

hahahahah true

Gassho,

Risho
-sattoday

[alan.r]

Something like this to me:

"Who says my poems are poems?
These poems are not poems.
When you can understand this,
then we can begin to speak of poetry."

-Ryokan

Gassho,
Alan
sattoday

[Stev]

Daizan, yes art/creativity is a wonderful thing and certainly , if there is such a thing, the art of Zen is in fact one of the things that drew me to Zen.

Koku you have stumbled from one accusation to another and now you criticize my own practice, much of what you have accused me of I haven't said. Let me be quite clear, I have said this three times now please understand what I am saying.

I find the artist's assertion about art and oxygen pretentious.

I am allowed to feel this lol

I find her wallowing in her suffering, that is how I felt after reading her interview. In fact I actually had a picture in my mind of hippos wallowing in mud.
The idea beauty comes from suffering is just her subjectivity under the cover of Zen. Yet Zen is not self help, it is not a therapy, it is a search for truth, the search for reality. Is art reality? I don't know, but I wouldn't take an artist's opinion, I formulate my own then I let it go.

I have sat today