What'll ya have?!

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Art: Naturally Occuring

When people think of nature, many things come to mind. Mountains, trees, and fauna would all probably be brought up when talking to a typical person about what nature is. A scholarly person might bring up smaller parts of nature (by smaller, I mean less visible) such as gravity or chemical reactions or cells in an organism. All of these things are natural, but one thing that is often seen as being too abstract to be of nature is art.
Art, which in a past blog post has been defined as a novel stimuli that triggers deeper thought and possibly alters one's perceptions, too abstract for nature? If humans are really a collective mass of chemicals, and we need ways to change some of these chemicals around (see: outlet, release) art is most assuredly natural. It is simply the product of a chemical reaction that influences much more than just a re-combination of atoms.
One thing that is very notable about nature is its stubbornness. If a  fish is taken out of water, it dies. If you put me into water, I'll probably try to swim to shore. If I don't make it, I will probably die. If you were to just put an ocean into the middle of a desert, the ocean would flatten out because of gravity and all sorts of chaos would ensue.
So then, since it is not acceptable to mess with nature's rules, why is it okay to remove a painting from its source? If someone took a beautiful tapestry from the High Museum in Atlanta and stuck it in a bathroom, it would probably have much less meaning. If an altar is moved from a church to the moon, it becomes a rock.
By all means, the location of a piece is just about as significant to a work as the context and history of the work itself.
Something is definitely wrong here.

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