#15
3rd Mar 2015 at 12:26 AM
But it's also not what is made, people "find art" all the time, because art has at least as much to do with the viewer as it does anything remotely to do with creation. Again, let's go back to money because it's the other part of my weird degree studies and something we imagine as much more quantifiable, but actually isn't. Money isn't "just" bills and coins in your pocket. It's abstract numbers in your electronic bank accounts, it's imagined money presumed from future investments, values artificially and arbitrarily decided upon by consensus and by fiat. It's goods. It's power. It's lack of power too.
Money is an abstract construct, just like art. It's something intangible we add to other things to allow assignation of value to those things. What everyone's pretty pictures of sunsets have to do with their "creative investment" is irrelevant. The important thing isn't the investment or effort, it's that abstract investment of value. Trying to nail it down is like trying to nail down all sorts of other arbitrary assignments of value in our lives - what's a friend? People declare what constitutes a friend and we've certainly got more of a vocabulary related to relative values of social relationships, but in the end there's not ultimate consensus. There's no empirical metric for why you like one person more than another that isn't as deeply personal as say, why you like cat pictures but dog pictures don't do anything for you. There's no explicit thing that says "a dollar is worth a nail," for much the same reasons as we can't really succeed at saying "Well, Monet is the best art. All other art is inferior."
We attempt these relative valuations with money, with our relationships, with art, and they're always unsuccessful. Our brains just don't work that way, even if one person's brain did it would be different from another's. How much is that nail worth when you want a glass of water? When you need a nail, or when you've got too many? Is the person you're sleeping with a more valuable friend than the one you've known forever, the one who satisfies some deep emotional need maybe? Or are you horny enough that it's "of course they are." What's the artistic merit of urban decay, of a flower? Birdsong vs. Mozart? We can try, but it's all bullshit. We don't work that way. Human beings are perfectly comfortable with amazingly fuzzy value systems and relative, flexible assignations of worth. We're terrible at making metrics for things like this. We're terrible at even explaining it, because it's so intrinsically wrought into the way our brains work. When people's brains don't work this way, we even declare them ill - no one's supposed to consistently value poorly. It's a symptom of depression. No one's supposed to consistently remove value from relationships - it could be a sign of serious brain imbalances.
You might as well ask what's the meaning of life. We're unequipped to answer. We create our answers as we go along and change them as we go along. It's not a single answer, it's merely the answer any of us are invested in at any given moment.