My heart has been constantly revisiting the concept of art in the last couple of months. What is art? A question I have had no definite answer to for most of my life, nor needed one honestly. Who cares. It didn’t really bother me for 26 years and I’ve led a pretty fulfilling life.
Well, it has started bothering me now. Bothering me so much that my thoughts are constantly overwhelmed and my heart constantly anxious. It has changed a neural circuit in my head. Everyday I descend deeper into the question - What is art?
I think I have answers. They scare me out of my skin and bones. Feels like all my life I have been looking at the world in complete silence and only just now realized I have ears to hear and a voice to speak. Phew, it’s so scary for so many reasons. How did I arrive here?
Inflection Point
I’ve been privileged to visit some great art museums here in the US. First one was NY MoMA that we visited in Feb ‘23, arguably one of the best collections of art in the world. It fell on dead eyes. I couldn’t understand anything. We walked across alleys, halls, floors of art. Picasso, Monet, Dali, Van Gogh. Nothing. If the piece hadn’t said “Pablo Picasso” at the bottom, I’d have dismissed it as an accident - 3 year old fell into paint, crawled over a canvas and peed on it. I was so removed from any emotion that the only response I had to The Starry Night was, ‘Smaller than I’d imagined’. Of the constant stream of people clicking selfies with the work I wanted someone to desperately start a monologue explaining why exactly is this piece great. I got so tired I let Anmol do the rest of the floors while I sat by the elevators to rest my legs. Fuck art, wasted $30.
That’s exactly why I was so averse to visiting SF MoMA in Sept ‘23. Didn’t want to set myself up for failure by visiting another great art museum and come back empty minded, feet tired and $30 poorer. Yet, as my middle-class upbringing has dependably taught me to get good marks no matter what the test, we bought the much-aspired-by-others tickets to SF MoMA one Friday. And yet again I found myself trying to find depth in paintings that fell on my dead eyes. Until.
I stumbled across a musical exhibit named ‘The Visitors’ by this guy named Ragnar Kjartansson. Most art museums are paintings, or in general things to look at. This was a first for me. Something you can hear. Having fiddled in some shallow waters of music for all my life, my ears are way more refined than my eyes. It was mind changing. Here I describe why. I’ve always wanted someone to describe what they see in a painting, no one ever does. I will.
[The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson](https://www.notion.so/The-Visitors-by-Ragnar-Kjartansson-ba5f8bc476f3428eb344a9a86cca00b4?pvs=21)
I was moved by the emotions this piece made me feel and how much I appreciated so many different corners of it. The dumbly plain realization truck hit me more profoundly - paintings are to eyes what music is to ears. No wonder I never appreciated paintings. Never done it. Don’t know what goes into it. Never tried to understand any of it. Show me an aesthetic piece and I love it. Show me anything else and you’d be showing it to a cat.
Art is about feeling emotions.
Answers
This hook starting tearing at the seams of my understanding of art, and I let it. I was dumbfounded by how many emotions I felt in just under an hour. How much it made me think on who I am, who everyone is. I love having deep talks with people and it felt like I’d come out of having a long deep conversation with no one in particular. Over the next few days, I stumbled across a book in a store in SF - The Creative Act, Rick Rubin. It left me standing naked in the rain.
Rick explains how humans are nothing but atoms, helplessly and inevitably experiencing other atoms in this universe. And life, want it or not, is a massive collection of all the experience. This is an undeniable truth. No matter we’re a simulation or not. No matter math or telescopes exists. No matter where you are, how you came to be, or what you do in your life. You will experience the world. The only way you don’t is if you’re dead.
I felt like I found an answer to what art is. Art is experiencing the world, processing the emotions and expressing it back to the world.
I started feeling stronger about this in the coming days as I attended Jacob Collier in Santa Barbara. Now, Jacob has inspired me in many different ways in life but mostly through his hard work. I always felt the magic in Jacob was how skilled he had become with music. How he could play so many instruments, layer so many voices, create so many chords and harmonies and that’s what is mind blowing about him. The sheer technicality with which he can wield music is the magic.
In my new realizations though I felt like I finally truly saw what the magic in Jacob was. It was his fearlessness in exploring music to it’s edges without rules, and having experienced it all choosing what he likes and using it to express what he felt. Finally felt like I had discovered it. It isn’t just hard work, it’s the emotion. Often I don’t get what Jacob’s trying to express, but sometimes I do. When I do, I dissolve in the magic and come out having had a long deep conversation with no one.
I am overwhelmingly realizing how art is about choice. One could choose from infinite musical notes, infinite variations of rhythms and melody. In this exhaustive tree of all possible choices a creator chooses only one path in space (painting, sculpture) or in time (music, poetry). It is intriguing to observe what gets chosen. Equally intriguing to observe what doesn’t get chosen. There is no wrong or right choice. Everything is art. The ones that get famous are those that reflect complex emotions of a large number of people of the world back at them. That doesn’t diminish the ones that express only the artist’s personal emotions and probably lies in their basement never displayed to anyone (imagine Kafka whose death wish was to burn down all his literature which no one had ever read, gives me goosebumps).
From this lens of choice, I realize, art is truth. Truth is singular. The only choice.
Pushing deeper into this lens I derive that the journey to expression is a journey of finding the only choice, inevitably finding the truth and hence your emotions. In a way it’s reverse. Art is expression, which drives processing emotions, which drives experiencing the universe. It feels like such an elegant loop. Someone eager to express might naturally be so much better attuned to experience life as it happens. Someone who experiences life might naturally be better at expressing emotions.
Why isn’t everyone expressing?!
Everyone would, if everyone could. We’re taught through school, in much excruciating detail, how to process our rational thoughts through paradigms of logic. At least the education I received involved being great at reasoning in sciences and math while learning to remember, as it is, massive amounts of the rest. But there were zero lessons on processing emotions.
Music classes were singing choirs. Art classes were replicating sceneries. History, Geography, Civics was mugging up “facts”, no subjectivity there. There was always only a single right interpretation of what we read in literature, the one our teachers taught. You have an opinion? Well better match the textbook or score a zero. Fundamental discouragement from processing your own emotions, opinion, subjectivity forget about learning to express it.
It’s so disturbing to read this study NASA did that found that while 98% of kids <5 years are genius level creatives, only 2% of adults are. Schools dependably make a machine out of you. A machine to make you a part of the machine. Goddamn Pink Floyd’s We Don’t Need No Education never hit me harder.
The only way of expression I use occasionally is language. Words. I type out a 3000 word verbose write up to explain what I feel emotionally, sometimes when I really can’t hold it in. How often do I do it? Hardly ever. Language and words often feel like a cage, a poor 144p expression of my 8k feelings. It’s insane how less I process my emotions. I don’t even know how to express simple emotions, let alone getting to complicated ones that I have accumulated in 25 years of being alive. Forget expressing, I now realize I haven’t even observed them properly because of being so bad at it. It’s so scary.
What now?
That’s why it feels like all my life I have been looking at the emotional world in complete silence and I’ve only just now realized that I have ears to hear and a voice to speak. It’s scary to know I was dead silent all my life. It’s scary to know I have the permission to listen. It’s scary to choose my first sound to speak.
Peeking into this weird emotional world has changed some gears in my heart. I live my life like before but everything’s different. I had written sometime back about how difficult a question it is of “Who am I?” and the pursuit of finding an answer to it will most likely liberate me, possibly enlighten me. I’ve firmly realized that the answer is nowhere in the rational realm. I can’t talk my way to the answer. I have to begin my journey in the emotional dimension and I have no clue how to. And that’s terrifying. But it has to begin with me trying to express, hence process, hence observe myself.
Having felt this my heart feels anxious. The burden of all the emotions I’ve experienced but never processed, let alone expressed, pushes against the walls of my heart with great force. The thick swirling soup of unresolved unobserved emotions in the heart. Absolute nightmare.
Also feeling all this doesn’t suddenly reveal all the beauty in every museum painting to my eyes. I’m still the same old dead retinas to great paintings. But I can appreciate the fact that someone somewhere took a trip through their emotions and was able to express themself in some satisfying form. I may not get it, but it must’ve liberated them. I can be happy to recognize that. Maybe one day I do see through, and feel it, and the day I do it’ll be so super fucking awesome.
All these various realizations and tugs at my heart have changed something in me profoundly. So much to unlearn and relearn. Feels like I’ve been a laborer all my life and have suddenly discovered I am human. I am better for it.