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The Ultimate Medium
About a year ago, as editor of PLR, I wrote a short piece on what makes good art. I said, "Art is good if it uses the medium properly. Every art has a medium; every medium is made up of a set of logical tools. These are the tools that help bring the art into existence. Let's take a canvas painting, for example. The tools are a brush, jars of paint, a subject, proper lighting, an easel, and hours of free time. The rest is up to the human brain - to put the paint on the canvas and create the art. When evaluating art, the ‘human brain element’ is what's really on trial. But that brain must first master a medium before it can be appreciated.
The paint is either on the brush or it's not. It either makes it to the canvas or it doesn't. An artist might want to wave the brush in the air for hours, or thoroughly clean everything up when he is done, but those parts of the process won't show up in the final piece. The only way to make the dried acrylic relevant is to put it on the canvas."
So is a medium confining or liberating? The American existentialist philosopher Rollo May thinks you need to acknowledge the structure of medium and use it to your advantage: "If you set out to write a sonnet, you run up against all kinds of recalcitrant realities in the laws of rhyme and scanning, and in the necessity of fitting words together; or if you build a house, you confront all kinds of determining elements in bricks and mortar and lumber. It is essential that you know your material and accept its limits ... The pattern and the style in which you build your house are products of how you, with an element of freedom, use the reality of the given materials."
Could it be said that all human action is art? Every human choice is an action, executed by a brain, using its freedom to impact a medium. Is not life itself a medium? Our society, and all life in it, is still governed by the logical tools of reality and we are granted the freedom to mold our own realities.
While we use our mediums to express creativity, we must consider also how our mediums define us. They define what we work with, while our freedom and creativity determine the end result. Without medium, there could be no evaluation of these end results.
I begin to wonder what my end result will be. I am fluent in many literary mediums, software mediums, automotive mediums, mechanical and electrical engineering mediums, and soon, the economic and entrepreneurial mediums. I am majoring in Entrepreneurial Studies at UIC, and just now discovering what that really means. It means my medium is the economic context, my tools are land, labor, and capital, and somehow I must weave these together, according to the rules of business ethics, supply and demand, and opportunity cost analysis to paint a profitable picture, to design a functioning company, to spin my own sturdy thread in the fabric of our economy. I’ll be playing with the biggest tools society has. As I shift my focus from Legos to Liabilities, I acknowledge that I have found the ultimate medium - capable of influencing more than just the emotions of the audience, but their very quality of life. I will make it an honorable masterpiece.
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| | Posted 11/27/2006 1:39 PM - 128 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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