Art is NOT Audience Participation
What I have come to understand in these few art history classes that I have taken. Is that I am over critical of the audience. Thus, I ask the question is art audience participation as we’d like to believe for the last few decades. I say, as you might have guessed, no.
A better way to state it is if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound? I answer this with a yes and here is why. The process in which the overall piece has taken into has made it an art. The truth I find is that audience members create too varied a construction for something so time consuming. The audience can be a problem because there is no one truth executed, but many truths. In this observation I find it flawed since the meaning is not an overwhelming, yes, but a small anything.
Incidentally, by creating the basis of just your highly personalized truth the universal truth is lost, but what is universal if there are already so many opinions out there. What are facts, but another bias interpretation of what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch? The truth are not in the facts then. The truth does not lie within others as well and I believe this is where we have strained.
We have let the truth in art slip away in the crevices and intricacies of the human mind and wander in the cerebellum for too long. It makes sense then as to why there is an accent of death hanging in the air for the most recent works from popular artists. But is the only truth really only death? There must also be life and this can be exemplified by Marni Kotak’s live birth performance.
But is there more life, death, these are simple all encompassing. But simple is misleading to say since simple is one of the hardest forms to represent in any piece. Maybe that is it, the piece. The piece is more universal than either of these which finally leads me back to audience participation. It is about the piece not the audience much like how it was about the subject not the process before Manet and his predecessors that led to this revelation.
But how to convey the piece, the missing piece, the sound of the tree falling in the forest when no one hears it?
