Is there any "rational" reason for being an artist?

To feel like you're better than the proles.

Not troll-bait enough? Oh well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

It's a bit of a 'how long is a piece of string?' question really. Answers could range from 'I genuinely couldn't imagine doing anything else with my life and enjoying it as much' to 'it will make me loads of money and help me have sex with girls'.

It's as openended as "reasons to have kids" but I guess more people feel qualified to shoot their mouths off randomly about that. Possibly because almost everyone faces the decision to have kids or not. While artificial forms of creativity are more... exclusive? I don't know.

well, without art the world would indeed be perculiar. could be an interesting movie idea.

Is design an art?

Architecture is very obviously an art... what would the world be like without buildings? Or only buildings built by engineers or builders?

Is this question,

"Is there any "rational" reason for being an artist (when you're not being paid/making a living from it)" ?

If you like.

But there are certainly fairly irrational occupations that people still get paid money for.

To get girls.

That's all I got.

But there are certainly fairly irrational occupations that people still get paid money for.

If you get paid for it, then doing it is hardly irrational, is it?

People get paid to be faith healers and homeopathists and stuff. I suppose that makes their reasoning rational, but it doesn't make the occupation rational.

Maybe I've phrased the question in the wrong way.

Are there any reasons to be an artist apart from money and attracting the opposite sex?

OK, are there any reasons to do *anything* apart from money and attracting the opposite sex?

Probably not. OK, in my personal experience, "art" doesn't do either of these things. So why do I still feel compelled to do it? I suppose that gets into the nebulous reason of emotional or even ::shudder:: spiritual needs. Which, of course, don't really exist in a rational, reductionist universe.

i'm trying to answer this question but just keep deleting my post due to head fuck.

i'll do it in steps

bcz It's the only thing you're any good at.

any art i've done for money has usually been dismal, or i've not enjoyed doing it. My treasured art is always something i've done for myself.

To answer Kate's last post, I think there are a host of rational, materialist reasons for doing music (apart from the ones you've named). Even the psychological release of creating without a master or boss to tell me what I can or can't do is extremely liberating. Then there's the hypnotic power of the music itself to induce certain pleasurable states, especially when combined with drugs and alcohol. Finally, for lazy people like me, there's undeniable social cachet in being an artist - one is expected to be weird, unconformist, rude, unpredictable and poor - and so one escapes social approbation if one tends in those directions anyway.

Also, I think music writing can be a very effective method of working on, and working through, your own difficulties - just like any hobby. You do something you're proud of and like, and you feel better about yourself. Most probably all these things are connected, but in my view the one thing I've never found in music is any kind of spirituality. Quite the opposite - one's appreciation for cause and effect, in the scientific sense, grows and grows.

In that sense I think artists are a bit like alchemists - protoscientists working with unpredictable materials, trying stuff out, seeing what happens, making dangerous mistakes sometimes - and, occasionally, giving birth to new sciences and methods which work and are useful to society at large.

That's a beautiful answer, Moley.

Do I link the frog & chimp movie again?

It seems the human brain needs various activities to stimulate it in order to work in a healthy manner. Since we only work a part of our waking hours, the other hours need to be filled with various other brain-stimulating activities. The shape these activities is defined differently in different cultures. From this point of view doing art is rational, but it's no different from playing darts or watching movies.

I'm not sure I agree, I put a lot of effort into my art - and my greatest art is done while I'm at work at the height of my day.

When I get home after work all i want to do is either sleep or go fishing.

Though, obviously, I have had a different experience WFT the spiritual aspect - art, especially music is one of the few places where I have felt genuinely spiritual experiences.

But I know that that is usually down to people's brains working in different ways - literal vs. metaphorical - and also labelling similar experiences in different ways.

x-posts

and Tuomas's answer makes no sense to me. Making art is qualitatively different to other recreational activities such as playing darts or watching movies. I will have to think in order to come up with *how* though.

actually my post makes little sense, if i've spent all day at work drawing instead of working then of course i don't want to do more art when i get home. eek

I'm not sure I agree, I put a lot of effort into my art - and my greatest art is done while I'm at work at the height of my day.

But I didn't mean to say work and art exclude each other, they're just different forms of stimulation. The way our brains work, we can't just work for 8 hours and then do absolutely nothing for the other 8 hours we are awake daily.

and Tuomas's answer makes no sense to me. Making art is qualitatively different to other recreational activities such as playing darts or watching movies. I will have to think in order to come up with *how* though.

No doubt there are qualitative differences if you look at these activities from some other point of view, but if we're strictly talking about what good they are for our brain/body, there's no difference.

There is a difference. I don't know how to express it in the purely reductionist terms you favour, but activities of quality "art" sooth the symptoms of my mental illness in a way that activities of qualities "playing darts" or "watching movies" simply do not. Which make me think that there is something - in terms of neurochemistry or whatever that is just different.

I didn't mean the same activities do the same thing for all people: for someone else doing art could be boring as hell, whereas playing darts would soothing the same way art is for you. But if you look at the functions these activities have for the brain in general, there's no qualitative difference.

Loss of sense of self.

If they have differing effects on different people, then that is fundamentally a qualitative difference! You have just proved my argument.

David Beckham taking a free kick; Lyra reading the alethiometer; Phil The Power Taylor throwing darts; a mathematics freak picking apart an equation; a videogames nut playing a level of Half Life; a guitarist jamming; all about loss of sense of self, if done right.

Training / practice gets you to a point where you no longer think about what you're doing and just do it, you become the task in hand with no thought for who you are, no concerns of character or whatever. And that includes no concerns of mental illness, or physical disability, or insecurity, etc etc.

Well, if that's a rational justification for art, then it also functions as a rational justification for religion, since that's what many people get out of it through prayer, meditation, etc.

If they have differing effects on different people, then that is fundamentally a qualitative difference! You have just proved my argument.

If we're talking about a single individual, yes, but I was talking about human beings in general.

"a mathematics freak"

...and if I'm really going to play devils advocate, I would say that it also supports rational justification for drinking, drug-taking and other artificial and quite possibly harmful forms of achieving that state.

(But explains why I was always suspicious of drug-taking as an unneccessary shortcut to states of mind that were better achieved by other methods because the journey was the important thing, not the destination.)

human beings are not rational. we might kid ourselves we are, but we're just not. we can employ all manner of reasoning techniques but, ultimately, our primitive branes are going to let us down somewhere along the line (gilhooly, 1988; klauer, musch and naumer, 2000; evans and feeney, 2004 and a staggering, staggering shitload more) when it comes to "pure" reasoning.

ILX's sudden obsession with so-called "rational" reasons for anything saddens me. the answer to any of these "is there any rational reason why ..." questions, always, is going to be "no". we're not rational, and we're not likely to be until our brains evolve into computers.

so: can we get back to being irrational, occasionally unpredictable arseholes now?

Be cool, the "rational" thing was just a dig at that whole attitude, as I spelled out repeatedly on the rational reasons to have children thread. I'm not interested in reductionism.

You can just leave the "rational" out of the question, and still answer it as you like. Reasons, justifications, whatever...

i.e. parody title, but not necessarily parody thread.

Certain young and naive people believe that becoming an artist will lead them to wealth and fame, which two outcomes they ardently desire, and which society would condone as rationally worthy goals.

However, I am not sure this counts as a "rational" reason to be an artist, any more than it would be to undertake an all-Metamucil diet in the expectation of becoming beautiful.

Art involves other people. It's an explicit engagement with the world of signs and discourse and culture. That makes it different from darts, or meditation or whatever.

it brings you pleasure. that's rational enough for me.

I'm not sure how we got onto "personal pleasure" and "rationality" being somehow identical

Art involves other people. It's an explicit engagement with the world of signs and discourse and culture. That makes it different from darts, or meditation or whatever.

-- Tracer Hand, Wednesday, August 20, 2008 6:36 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

wrong

what about a skateboard trick

i think when you do something, your mind interprets it as either pleasurable or painful, after your body makes this distinction. understanding how things affect you is a rational process.

Rationality is more a means for sorting and categorizing data and for finding logical relationships within a data set, than it is a method for determining values. Values, goals or ethical judgements always require an emotional component somewhere, in order to define what is desirable, valuable, or pleasing.

oops i guess i should have read the thread

hey guys if andy goldsworthy makes a sculpture and forgets to take a picture, is it art or just practice?

but i think certain data sets involve emotions, no? i don't know that it has to be completely mutually exclusive

gbx, it is art, but not marketable art.

so is this thread like The Fountainhead or some shit

bahaha i think so

When we talk about humanity, social groups, etc., there is no rationality ... we as animals are a product of hodge-podge evolution. Artists are a core component to human social groups... maybe it was a trait selected for, who the hell knows. Members of the opposite sex certainly find "arists" sexy.

Though I guess -some- kind-of "reason" people actively choose to be an 'artist' is to get laid. Being seen as creative lets all sorts of weirdos and those born with physical shortcomings get a little somethinsomethinknowwhatimean.

Art involves other people. It's an explicit engagement with the world of signs and discourse and culture. That makes it different from darts, or meditation or whatever.

Oh my god, no. I think I've shown art like 10% I've made to anyone, and then only hardly anyone.

It is like one of the most private, insular things I do. 90% of it, anyway.

Art involves other people. It's an explicit engagement with the world of signs and discourse and culture. That makes it different from darts, or meditation or whatever.

I don't understand this at all. As far as I know, darts also involves other people, and has its own discourse and culture, just like any hobby. Anyway, my point was that the signifigance of these various activities to the human brain is the same, not that you can't find any differences between using other (social, cultural, etc.) indicators. So even if the social/cultural contexts to this various pastimes are different, that doesn't change what I was trying to say.

I'm not sure how we got onto "personal pleasure" and "rationality" being somehow identical

well then it's "personally rational" ?

why should something be un-rational because it doesn't benefit other people?

My art is also about 90% never seen by anyone else, although this is the case I do strive to make art that I can show off to my friends and family.

That was from the former thread, where Tuomas realised that "rational" wasn't the word he was looking for, and switched to "utilitarian" - whatever was going to bring the most personal pleasure.

This stuff has been banging around in my head all night, and woke me up at 4am so I probably need to do some more thinking about it. Or just abandon it as a thoughtworm.

I like this... I think it's a good approximation.

Rationality is more a means for sorting and categorizing data and for finding logical relationships within a data set, than it is a method for determining values. Values, goals or ethical judgements always require an emotional component somewhere, in order to define what is desirable, valuable, or pleasing.

But I think the dichotomy is somewhat false. Because rationality and emotion often bleed over into one another in real life situations.

I think too many things have been split into these dualistic oppositions, reason *or* emotion, subjective *or* objective, mind *or* body (the classic Cartesian split). When real life situations are never so black and white, they're much more like a gradient scale. Or an X-Y axis on which two interdependent qualities are charted.

...or a messy, confusing multi-dimensional world of colour and sound.

I like an idea of a synthesis of Tuomas and Nick's ideas... that the brain (or the mind, or the spirit, or, to use an old-fashioned word, the soul) has certain needs, for downtime if you will, or for a different way of operating which results in a loss of sense of self.

That there are certain needs that are not physical (well, maybe they are if consciousness can be reduced to brain chemistry)...
-the need for loss of sense of self
-the need to connect to community
-the need to feel a sense of place within world/universe
-needs for meaning or purpose

And there are different ways that human beings get these needs of the brain/mind/spirit met - making art, playing games, meditation/prayer, unpicking mathematical equations, attending concerts or sporting events or religious ceremonies or political meetings.

Varying solutions for varying personalities and intellects and abilities and talents. And value judgements about which one is inherently better or more valid or more useful reveal more about the person (inluding their own perferences, values and culture) doing the judging than the activity?

Depends if you accept the idea of human universals doesnt it? Is there a deeper reason why some works of art resonate more deeply or is it all just a cultural value judgement? I tend to think that there is some sort of universal human nature that bias cultural evolution towards certain types of art

I'm always very cautious whenever anyone starts talking about "universal human nature." However, lots of study of images of art from varying cultures does show that humans tend to be attracted to certain images - images of faces is a quite obvious one to start with. As are images of vistas including refuges. (cue the entire genre of landscape paintings.) One can easily imagine why these images would be instinctually appealing to humans.

cautious is good, but where did your caution lead you?

poet in my heart, walk with me across the mysterious land. We can still be hunters in the million year dreamtime. Our minds are full of calculation and emotion. We are aesthetes tense with anxiety.

If you claim there's some "universal human nature" regarding arts, then you'd have to explain where it comes from. Genes? God? I mean, it's rather obvious that in visual arts people draw things most close to them, like other humans or the nature surrounding them, but that doesn't need any "universal consciousness" to explain it.

Well, caution has lead me to realise that many things that people speak of as "universal human nature" are entirely culturally and contextually based. And, as I said above, reveal more about the biases of the person doing the describing rather than any kind of universal human nature.

The human like of faces and vistas-with-refuge does seem to be deeply engrained on an instinctual level. I'd guess that's something gene-based.

Anyway, what Kate and me where talking about was not art objects but the process of making art and its importance to the human mind. The point, I think, was that when talking about various human pastimes, like playing darts or making art, you can't make value judgements saying some activity is more valuable than other when talking about its importance to the individual.

(x-post)

Be careful with that reasoning, Tuomas. You may not like where it leads you. ;-)

The human like of faces and vistas-with-refuge does seem to be deeply engrained on an instinctual level. I'd guess that's something gene-based.

Why should it be gene-based? Isn't it more easy to explain that these are the things most people see around them from the earliest childhood, and hence it's the most obvious choice to draw them. Do you think a child whose been raised by wolves and has never seen other humans or a mirror would still draw human faces?

I didn't say human faces, I said faces. Anything with a face is a useful thing to be able to spot quickly - not just because it could be a member of your species/tribe, but also to help you attain lunch/stop you from being someone else's lunch.

Pattern recognition of faces is a very useful inbuilt instinct to have - and yes, babies develop it from a very very young age. There have been studies on this, though I think even you would think it would not be a good idea to deprive babies of human contact to see whether it develops in isolation. (though the historical "wild child" cases you speak of have actually displayed recognition of faces.)

(Though I am talking about images that humans respond to, rather than that which humans create.)