How I started enjoying art

Art is great because it’s accessible by nature. You can literally just look at it and see whatever it is. It’s easier to grasp than literature, which can sometimes require you to know certain vocabulary and also require more time/some patience. 

I hate how many things have become so “intellectualized.” A big part of the reason I didn’t like art when I was younger was because of my English classes in middle and high school. They were pretty bad at encouraging you to come up with your own opinions. I remember I once turned in a quiz (on something related to Egyptian mythology) in 10th grade English, and I got pissed because I got marked off for a “defend your answer”- type question. When I asked the teacher why my answer was wrong, she essentially gave me a “because I said so” response. There were many instances of teachers saying “as long as you provide compelling supporting evidence, I’ll accept it,” but not following through. I think this contributed to me internalizing a narrative of me not being able to form my own opinions on things that require interpretation. Standardized testing probably didn’t help with that either.

A big realization that helped me let go of that narrative is that the intention of the creator can be completely different from what you actually get from a work. You don’t have to read into all the symbolism and the inspiration from other artworks and the context of the piece within the movement. (If you do want to learn about those though, audio guides have been serving me pretty well.) I think all that should matter is what you want to get from that piece. In particular, how does it make you feel? 

One of the things I’ve begun to really appreciate about art is how it can serve as a shot of feeling. That’s why well designed monuments are so powerful, and I think it’s great that monuments are usually designed to be quite accessible. However, you can experience other art that way if you change your mental frame to “what can I get from this?” And pssst - you can get nothing and just walk away.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No man steps in the same river twice

I love this quote, and here is the full version: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man” (Heraclitus). In the past, I fixated on the “[for] he’s not the same man” part of the quote. I thought, every time I face a challenge, I’m benefiting from all the past work I’ve done and all the experiences I’ve had. Each moment, a new me is born, and this is the me that engages with the world anew.  More recently, the “for it’s not the same river” bit has become more salient to me. As I wrote in my ( senior thesis ) solo show, “ I thought I found myself over my gap year, I thought I had grown self-confidence, and had learned how to love myself. It’s funny which lessons you have to relearn over and over. Life is so weird, and beautiful like that.” 💕 What those lines don’t capture is how frustrating it feels to struggle with the same thing, over and over again.  But actually, what I realized, and what Heraclitus’s quote is pointing
Read more

On binge eating and yin-yang energies

tw: mentions of disordered eating I’ve struggled with binge eating behaviors for a long time, knowingly since I was in college, but likely for almost all of my life, unknowingly. I remember when I was a kid, my mom bought me a bag of sour gummy worms, and when we got home, she put it in a cabinet where I theoretically wouldn’t be able to access it. But one day when I was alone, I climbed on a chair to open the cabinet and ended up demolishing that bag after doing that multiple times throughout the day. That was way too many sour gummy worms for my stomach and body to handle, even as a kid! More recently, I’ve been aware of how I use binge eating to self soothe—as a type of unhealthy coping mechanism that in the process of doing it, causes other short- and long-term discomforts to arise. Notably, I feel like it will be very difficult for me to deepen my self-love and self-trust if I maintain this self-sabotaging pattern. During the February silent meditation retreat here at MAPLE, I had
Read more

Systems thinking and economic indicators

I’ve been reading about Internal Family Systems (IFS) again recently, and so I’ve been freshly re-exposed to that systems thinking way of seeing. Viewing our behaviors and reactions as interdependent/interwoven, as opposed to as independent symptoms that can be individually targeted and “fixed.” For instance, the book  No Bad Parts  includes a case study that illustrates how one woman’s suicidal, manic, sleepy/dissociated, and abused parts are all occurring in relationship to one another. It can be easy or tempting to pathologize various parts, but targeting one part without an understanding of the reality it exists in—or that it perceives it exists in—can lead to an increased sense of threat and further spiraling, as the system bounces back even more intensely. In recent circling contexts, I’ve also been engaging in systems thinking in the form of the concept of leading and lagging economic indicators. “A leading indicator is an economic factor that tends to change before the economy
Read more