Is Life Art?

[Blaggard]

If life is art it's painted by a mad man, a confused fool and an idiot, and often colour blind and completely unaware of the medium of aesthetics or culture therein. If life is art, it's a painting by moron I think, an unimaginative one at that. With probably learning difficulties and a penchant for rape.

[popeye1945]

Life is art in the sense that it is experience, art intentionally evokes a particular experience in the viewer.

[Agent Smith]

These artsy folks are loco. Look at that, it's just a bloody dot, and that, that my 3 year old cousin could draw it and better, and this, this really takes the cake, I found somethin' exactly like this - same colors, same shapes, same paper, same everythin' - in Rico's trash. Do you know who Rico is? No, you don't wanna know, you really don't wanna know who Rico is!

[popeye1945]

Art is experience, the creation of art is the creation of an experience, the intention most often is the beautiful, but art can embrace the not so beautiful, as part and parcel of the reality of existence. The further away from the beautiful, the further away the subject is to remaining in existence, as it falls into chaos, and back into potential. Is life art? Experience is life, and art is an object experience. As subject and object stand or fall together, the two constitute apparent reality. Apparent reality is the world of objects/beings, art is a celebration of being/objects as subjectively experienced.

[attofishpi]

Life is a construct of molecules in the form we term DNA. What that construct constructs can be construed as 'art'. But no, life is not art.

[nemos]

Art is a means of expression - to express your feelings and emotions, all the things that logic fails to do. For example, how to represent intonation or emotional background in written texts.

So if we accept that the world was created by a god, then perhaps in this context it can be seen as artificially created, or as a work of art in which a god talks to us, or to someone else, possibly a god too or the devil as his eternal opponent.

Of course each of us is also the creator of our own lives, so under a certain angle each of us can be seen as artists, and our lives as works of art.

[Walker]

I believe life is art only if you want to see it that way.

I think you're right.

Performance Art is an imitation of life, and it's art because elevated attention and energy are required to consciously enter into and maintain the continuity of whatever role a situation requires to participate in Performance Art.

When one applies the same level of attention and energy to every movement and moment, then one is living life as art, and one tends to move with the relaxed, unhurried precision of a full-mane'ed lion.

Who would have the will and dedication to live all their life as performance art? Answer: One without a choice, like a lion.

When all of life's illusions and beliefs are shattered, one has no choice but to live life as art, in order to take the next step.

It's called mindfulness, and without mindfulness one is limited, and banned from enlightenment. Every good abstract expressionist was first a good realist, figuratively if not literally.

Eventually one rides the winds of wu wei and hollers wee wee wee, all the way home free.

[Walker]

Give the credit to God.

S.D.G.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o

[Walker]

Have listened to this many times (over the decades!): a good tune for carpentry and painting.
The vibrations are in my bones now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddbxFi3-UO4

[Walker]

Functional Art:

These large fellows guard the Freer Gallery interior. They stand at the end of a hallway with their backs to the wall. They are Guardians of the treasures where we visit, but not recently. I have actually dared to stand before them.

[Walker]

This is art because it unforgettably touches as lightly as a hummingbird, but if you need to be told that it's art, or why it's art, it's not art to you.

"I had heard a lot about thermostats, and I knew there was one in the car somewhere, but just where, and just what it looked like, I didn't know. I evaded all references to the subject as skillfully as I could. Again I was ashamed not to know where and what this piece of apparatus was. Starting out from New York, after receiving a brief explanation about the functioning or non-functioning of the thermostat, I had expected the shutters of the hood to fly open automatically when the heat gauge read 180 or 190. To me thermostat meant something like a cuckoo in a cuckoo clock. My eye was constantly on the gauge, waiting for it to hit 180. Rattner, my then side-kick, used to get a bit irritated watching me watch the gauge. Several times we went off the road because of this obsession on my part. But I always expected that some time or other an invisible man would release the trap and the cuckoo would fly out and then bango! the shutters would open up, the air circulate between the legs, and the motor begin to purr like a musical cat. Of course the damned shutter never did fly open. And when the gauge did finally hit 190 the next thing I knew was that the radiator was boiling over and the nearest town was forty miles away."

- Henry Miller
The Air Conditioned Nightmare

[Walker]

From the days when the world was more cerebral ...

L'Allegro
By John Milton

Exerpt:

Come, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe,
And in thy right hand lead with thee,
The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty;
And if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free;

(Definitely Right Wing)