Art

I was pondering the other day, what exactly is art? Is it the depiction, in any chosen medium, of any moment? An idea? Perhaps it is the act of palpating whatever the artist was inspired from? We will never have a concrete idea of what exactly art is. It is a hydra, whose nine heads grow into nine more heads every time one head is cut off. It is constant, it is ever changing, it evolves with the human mind, it is tangible because it is abstract. It is the most incomprehensible achievement of mankind, where a world of energy is put into something completely unnecessary, at least from an evolutionary point of view. It is not needed for survival, yet how did it become what it is today? It has grown with mankind, it has personalities of it's own; personalities shaped and chiselled by minds, millions of them, into what pleases something so mundane and physical as the senses we possess. Be it the subtle notes of Lacrimosa that melts a stone to tears or the magnetic attraction of the Mona Lisa, virtually nothing, in it's basest form, and somehow fascinates the human imagination into seeing a woman smile; just a very normal day-to-day affair, a mere smile, and it has captured millions of eyes, hearts and most importantly, the enigmatic fascination and attraction of brilliant minds. We try to make sense of the world around us. We can't live without this marvellous trait, so necessary for survival, that we have it hard-wired into our brains. This is simply the only way in which we can see our surroundings; we need the world to make sense, we want order, a pattern we can relate to, a pattern that we need to find, or invent, the case is purely subjective, and applaud ourselves for looking at things that never possibly are. We crave the satisfaction of understanding or recognising something as familiar; we bask in the happiness of the known, one of the prime reasons for this particular habit of the human race. So, a mere sheet of canvas with organic pigment dabbed on it strategically finds itself ogled at by thousands who never seem to get enough of it because it resembles something we know, something like a woman smile, a scenery of lush wilderness, a sight that invokes feelings of tranquility in us. This is art. It can never be explained in a sentence. The more we try to define this, the more abstract it gets. It is an institution that relies solely on how one can look at things. It is the only aspect if the human mind where everyone is right, everyone is wrong. It encompasses everyting our mind can conjure, a fully formed kinesthetic in one's own head to the most intangible swirl of colours that show nothing and yet make you feel the subject inside you rather than show. We have made art grow with us, from the simple cave drawings to today's impressionist abstractism, art matured under the nurturing care of the human mind. It blossomed, grew into a butterfly but never cocooned, it was always on the upper trend, purely because we call it upper trend. Art has no direction, no depictions of the woolly mammoth in the caves of Europe are bested by the Last Supper, considered the pinnacle of refined, "civilised" renaissance art. We call ourselves as most evolved, we call an oddly shaped rock aesthetic; we are, because the world is, which in turn is because we are. Similarly art is, because we are, we are because world is, art is because world is and we are because art is. Art can never exist on it's own, it needs us, we need art, as it is the only medium of interaction with our environment. But then, it is only in our head that we communicate with our universe. Objectively, the universe is nothing but fragments of a one-time explosion, we, nothing but a mere accident. But through the lenses of art, we see a different world, a world that nurtures us, cherishes our existence, where we matter, where we are not just insignificant clots of space junk stuck in a moderate planet. This is because we see ourselves that way. This is the way we create art, that is the way we are created. We adore ourselves, we need art to adore ourselves, we adoreart. We are art.