This Art is Not Art

Welcome back to AND THE SUN, an out-of-pocket newsletter about creative, artistic, and inventive approaches to meditation. Thanks for reading.

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This week I’ve written armchair art philosophy. The discourse around this topic is gigantic and I’ve read none of it. Read on!

This week’s guided meditation is a technique for allowing creative ideas to emerge. Try it with something you’re trying to create. It’s one of my favorites, I use it all the time. Enjoy!

Lately, I’ve been feeling generative. I’m creating lots of things, and getting better at creating things – you’ve seen some of them there. Yet, few of these creations feel like art. What gives?

I think it comes down to expression. Is something being said with the creation?

So this little idea came to me for how to understand what’s been happening:

creativity + craft + expression = art

From the perspective of the creator

(Creator) Creativity

Generation. Stuff just coming out. Unexpectedness is part of this, but not in the way you might think: it’s about internal unexpectedness, the feeling of “oh, this idea just appeared, cool!” rather than “has anyone ever done this before?”

(Creator) Craft

The process of making. Wrestling with subtle details, getting to know different techniques, refining a process. The time-consuming, skilled part.

(Creator) Expression

Saying something, intentionally. Or, intentionally allowing the unconscious to say something. Or, generally being aware that “something” is coming out in the creation. Expression is what happens when the act of creating is, or is produced through, an act of meaning-making – in which we engage with “this”, “that”, and the ever-changing relationship between this and that. (The artist may be the “this”, their lover may be the “that”, and the painting of their lover is their engagement with the relationship.)

In other words, creativity conceives of possible components; craft selects which components to use, produces them, and decides how to put them together; and expression shapes the vibe of the creation, through a process of meaning-making.

Here are some examples to elucidate the framework, and to show that all three pieces are needed in order for a creation to be deemed art.

• This inquiry was inspired by the fact that I’ve been working on interactive meditation experiences, which is a creative act itself. And I’ve been getting better at it – developing that craft. It hasn’t felt like art, though. The insight, now, is that even with my most aesthetically refined interactive meditations so far, I haven’t been trying to express anything. Hence, they haven’t been art.

• Consider the infamous conceptual art piece, the banana taped to a wall. It’s creativity is self-evident: there are an infinity of simple possibilities, how does one arrive at this one? Its craft is conceptual. And its expression is made clear by the piece’s title, Comedian. Its ridiculousness is its subject.

• Lastly, how about Marina Abramovic’s works? Such as the performance piece in which she sat in a chair at MoMA for eight hours a day, six days a week, for three straight months – locking eyes with visitors who sat across from her. As with the banana, the creativity is obvious; the craft is both in the intensity of the demands of the performance, and the skill in choosing one out of an infinity of possible simple activities that could fall within the domain of performance art; and the expression is deep, surely including meaning-making around stillness and presence (the piece was titled, The Artist is Present). 

From the perspective of the viewer

If we separate out the creator from the viewer, which we should because that’s a cosmically-sized divide, we can then re-interpret these three components with regards to the viewer.

(Viewer) Creativity

From the viewer’s perspective, this is mainly experienced as “unexpectedness”. 

(Viewer) Craft

This is the viewer’s understanding or perception of the technical skill required to accomplish the work. Moreover, there’s an element of awe and human appreciation: when a viewer feels like a piece took a long time, or must have been hard to pull off, it creates a feeling of awe and appreciation. This is similar to watching athletes. (Next time you see a piece of art with large scale or substantial technical difficulty, see if you can find the feeling of awe.)

(Viewer) Expression

This encapsulates what the viewer thinks the artist is saying. When we intuitively believe a creation is an intentional act of communication about, or from, the creator themselves in a context that’s relevant to us, the creation then becomes something we want to interpret, and it belies a creator we want to understand. (Contrast this with, for example, the design of an icon – unless, of course, we are a designer ourselves, in which case we might indeed notice the intentionality behind the crafty creation, and deem this to be art). Moreover, separating out the artist to some degree, once we’re intuitively convinced the creation is an object worthy of meaning (due to the intentionality behind its creation), we can loosen ourselves from the grip of considering the artist and instead project our own meaning onto the piece. What, exactly, the expression is – that can be our own meaning we project onto the piece.

By way of elucidating this equation from the viewer’s perspective, looking at AI art can teach us something interesting. This understanding of art helps elucidate the quandary of why AI-generated images don’t feel like art (as a specific instance of the broader category of creative AI). The images are generative, but since AI image generation is a commodity, as viewers we neither assume the human creator was crafty (they gave ChatGPT a prompt), nor do we assume it took a long time (ChatGPT took five seconds to reply). In terms of expression, when I see an AI image in the wild, I attribute less – but not zero – expressiveness to the human creator. 

What can you do with the framework?

The goal of the framework, aside from being a ball of yarn for the conceptualizing mind, was actually practical: it helped me understand why the things I was creating weren’t feeling like art. The answer was simple: because I wasn’t trying to say anything!

Along these same motivation lines, this framework also suggests three manners of developing one’s art practice. Nothing new here, I’m just a fan of elegant little frameworks and articulating what these frameworks conclude. 

1. Generativity: see more things to “train” your “generative model”, and work on relaxing your body and beliefs, because our minds naturally become generative when we relax and open up.

2. Craft: learn new skills; refine existing skills; explore “the best of the best” and understand what went into it.

3. Expression: inquire within; do inner work; conduct internal inquiry with other people to help you feel safe to know thyself.

This week’s meditation, at the top of the newsletter, is a technique for cultivating generativity.

Also, I built a custom GPT to apply this framework to a situation of your choosing. I call it ArmchairGPT. You can use it here.