Tuesday, October 22, 2013

My cartoon ART is your perception

Amber Larson, Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Arkiharha (Scandinavian comic artist Saara, 18, Weekday-Illusion and Arkiharha.Sarjakuvablogit.com)
What artist would ruin her art by telling anyone what it actually meant? It's as personal to me as it is to you...unless Maroon 5 discovers you on Flickr. Then it's as personal as Adam's agent says Following interpretations not that of the artist! (Arkiharha/flickr)
The artist Arkiharha, Saara, writes in Finnish.
What is "art" but a statement, one transcending language? A flag should bear no words. Words, on the one hand, formalize ideas. Images, on the other hand, allow for free-form associations, eidetic, ripe connotations, sly symbolic suggestions, eerie emaciated thinking full of emotions...

See. See me. Who do you really see?
It's a different use of cognition, exploiting this or that hemisphere of the brain, if that theory of a difference holds any weight. We use both sides all of the time!

What it means to the artist is interesting, but what it means to the viewer is almost all that actually matters. 

I'm a fat American on the Web. I search startpage.com and kuh-ching. I find it! My dream dating site for seniors -- Carbon Dating. Ooh, look at these elder honeys. What should I write? Hi, my is Joe Blow, and I've got lots of cash... This is funnier than the Finnish version.
 
Cry or don't cry. It's better not to cry, crybaby.
This is why artists tend to avoid defining their works. Why add a definitive interpretation that might wipe out other equally valid interpretations? It's "Zen."

Why ask me what I mean when we could all be asking, "What does it mean to me?"? Questions are only for those who question.

Is there any meaning in the ravings of artists and lunatics?

Is there any sense in the assertions of critics and passive lovers of art? I mean, what does "Pussy Riot" mean exactly? Nadia can explain, but people will think something else.
Even "Buddhist art" -- which often symbolizes a narrative or lesson more than existing for its own sake or for devotional abuses -- is what it is to the viewer more than the maker. To be sure, most makers have something in mind. 
 
But in the end, it's the art that meets the eye, the beauty that beholds it more than the beauty beheld by the eye that counts.
 
Despicable Me for all to see

I know! I'll become an "artist"! Then I can really live!
I saw a dead steer in the sun, worm oozing from its eye. I cried. My tears watered the desert. I took a death cross, set it in the sun, smoked, and let the worms win.
Girls night out! But I met a guy. It's every gal for herself! Look at the time. Where is she? Let's forget our pact and leave without her! You look different in the morning.

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