How do the arts communicate differently, and what are the consequences of those differences?

This is a great early morning question. I like the thoughts that you have laid out (especially regarding the conversation). I am going to mark this question and answer more tomorrow. I don’t know why I commented at all, rather than just marking, but I wanted to let you know that I love the concept of what you are saying. I am sleepy now…..I will return to discuss furher later.

“Yet artists of all kinds will tell us they are creating art because they want to. For themselves; not for anyone else. To which I say, “bullshit!” Art is part of an important conversation. If it is purely for the artist who created it, then that artist is probably a bit, if not a lot crazy.”

Many times, the conversation is within ourselves. There is nothing crazy about trying to understand, or come to terms with, your own inner voice.

I agree with @Seek_Kolinahr. With creativity, there is need to let out what’s inside. Artistic expression is about conveying perspective and emotion. It has to come out. I’m not sure it’s so much about a conversation with others, as it is connectivity, which are mutually exclusive.

As an artist myself, I can tell you that creating art is something that I am compelled to do. I can’t help myself when I get some free time, I take up a needle, some canvas and yarn, and I just make things. It has very little to do with communicating, and much more to do with getting the ideas out of my head and into my working.

I wouldn’t care if no one ever saw it. In fact I have boxes full of stuff I made that I donate to Charity Thrift stores every year, since I no longer have the energy to sell it at the craft shows myself.

When I used to make commission costumes, I would always have to embellish them because I couldn’t bear to leave off the trims and decorations that were in my mind’s eye. Somehow, the people who received them were always pleased.

I write, and like @josie said, I sometimes do so for myself. If someone else enjoys what I wrote, that’s wonderful. I’m in no way against that. Just not always putting it first in my mind. I am sure visual artists are often even more involved in creating for themselves. working out their own thoughts and musings about the world.

@Seek_Kolinahr delved into this quote, “Yet artists of all kinds will tell us they are creating art because they want to. For themselves; not for anyone else. To which I say, “bullshit!” Art is part of an important conversation. If it is purely for the artist who created it, then that artist is probably a bit, if not a lot crazy.” I would take it further. Sometimes it is the insanity that drives the art and makes it speak to us all. Look at Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. It was the musing of a very troubled mind, but it has touched millions who felt the artist’s world through it.

Writing a technical book demands a little artistic flair. You have to make it fun to read, or at least should. You have to think about how to present information in a form that can easily be understood without a Q&A session. But writing a great novel is much more an artistic endeavor. The story line still has to make sense just as the tech book must, but you also have to touch the reader’s heart and engage their mind in something far greater than just the facts laid out in the plot.

It seems we are intermixing three distinct subjects:

Craft – skills people do for their own sake,
Art – the notion of creating something with the intent to cause effect (even within yourself), and
Dialogue – building upon someone’s speech or writing (etc.), one informing the next in turn.

(Granted, someone will come out of the woodwork and shoot down this timid working definition of art, because the battle of art is to actively destroy any attempt to define it. – And yes, these three terms are not mutually exclusive.)

Are you trying to contrast the 7 arts (or whatever new number you want to adopt) – art history stuff – aesthetics philosophy stuff – or are you talking about Fluther?

The format here is not one to build dialogue. People talk “past” each other constantly. Basically there is a “pitch” question, and everyone swings for the fence. The questions are like pinatas, and everyone has their own Wiffle ball bat. Only in [social] are people allowed to banter back and forth, but a lot of that “dialogue” is cliquey playground politics stuff.

So…

I would just add that the purpose of language (and thus writing) is to communicate with others, so no matter what people say, practicing conversations, or writing, ultimately serves the function of communicating with others – that’s why we do it. All the arts do not share this.

I think many people here are not very social, and are just practicing their chops for what they wish they could say everyday to real people. Fluther taps into a kind of dream state, where you compensate and practice for “real life”.

@ipso – I respectfully disagree with the idea that “many people here are not very social, and are practising chops for what they wish they could say everyday to real life people…”

1. I don’t think writing as a form of communication is any less valid than face to face speech in social value.
2. I don’t see it as “compensatory”

I do agree that this question is a bit confusing (is it about how some mediums seem more private than others?), and I’m not entirely sure where to begin to stab at it; though it certainly it contains topics that fascinate me. Maybe I’ll try again later…

@Seek_Kolinahr “Many times, the conversation is within ourselves”

I know that many artists (and when I say “artist” I don’t mean any one particular medium) say this. Here is why I think it is bullshit. Art is part of language. It is communication. You may believe you are having a conversation with yourself, but I don’t think that is possible. Language does not allow this. The whole purpose of language (and I use “language” here to mean all forms of communication) is to express ideas to others. If there were no others, there would be no language and no communication. It wouldn’t be necessary.

The very fact that you are using language means that you are trying to communicate and if you are communicating, there must be an other. Communication requires an other. It can not be done to oneself (unless one has more than one completely separate personalities). There is no need. The thoughts we think require no symbols to express them unless we have to express them to someone else.

We can say we are doing it for ourselves. We can say we are doing it to find out what we think. We can believe we are doing it without regard to anyone else. However, it would not be possible to do without reference to others; without communicating with others.

@ipso I really appreciated what you wrote. Just one clarification—I am not talking about fluther. I am talking about all the different art forms and how they work differently (as in how you say things differently and what you can say in one form that you can’t say in another).

I think your idea that the fluther format encourages people to either talk past each other or to engage in social bonding conversation (cliquey playground politics) is an interesting perception. I wonder. Do you think this is much different from anywhere else? Actually, I do. I think that because we can read what everyone else writes, and we don’t have to always be thinking about what we want to say next or how to score conversational points, we can actually pay attention to other people’s points if we want to.

Granted, many people skip everyone else’s comments and just throw in their own two cents’ worth. But this, I think is little different from verbal conversations. And much of verbal conversation, I think, is about social bonding. It’s about people congratulating themselves and all agreeing on what they think. It’s boring from an intellectual perspective, but it is very important from a social networking perspective.

@lifeflame I’m sorry about the confusion regarding the question. I tried to re-explain it in this comment, but I think the topic is so large and muddled that I’ll never tack it down. So I would suggest that whatever piques your interest is what you should focus on and run with as long as it interest you.

I guess I want to know how people compare the various artistic mediums to each other. Part of it is what the arts do in general. Part of it is how the arts do it differently and the impact of those differences in terms of what that art can do.

@wundayatta

I take it to mean you have never in your entire life, talked to yourself? Not even “Way to go, self. Forgot to buy butter. Again”?

I’ve been writing the same group of stories for over 12 years. It’s my own fantasy planet, with deep characters with whom I have almost an emotional connection. No one has ever read my stories. It is something I write for myself. It makes me feel good.

@Seek_Kolinahr I think that writing for yourself is different from writing to yourself.

When I am talking to myself, I usually am talking someone else. It confuses my wife when I talk to my computer. She thinks I’m talking to her, and I am, except what I’m really doing is expressing frustration that something isn’t working.nothing she can do though so she just gets annoyed.

@wundayatta – Pickup a quick read entitled This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin. It provides a fascinating (and I think brilliantly written) insight into why we like music – what the art “means” to the human system.

I would take his approach to a wide variety of examples of art and seek to understand how they are “meant” to impact human systems, and look at differences and similarities from that POV.

Or more traditionally, things like this, this, and this, may arouse interesting notions and more specific questions.

Somewhere in there is the famous quote “Aesthetics is to art what ornithology is to the birds”, but you seem to want to explore the more philosophical side of it.

And I am totally with you on the “crazy” thing. I imprinted on the notion that if someone is talking to themselves they are crazy. I see someone talking to themselves in a store, and even though I assume they have a cell phone somewhere, I still cannot shake the notion that they are insane. The absurdity of it. Their shamlessness. I’m afraid I confront people on it more often than not. Especially people driving in the fast lane who are giving themselves 20 car lengths of empty space in front of them, or someone in line at a Point of Sale who is more focused on girl-talk than moving along and paying the cashier.

Some of my friends see my recent “black hole” efforts here online with the same disparaging eye. Am I not doing the same thing?

@lifeflame – I don’t see it as “compensatory” either – unless you have to claim it on your W2 tax form. However, do you not think writing is “rewarding”? If so, why is it rewarding?

You wrote: “I don’t think writing as a form of communication is any less valid than face to face speech in social value.” Although I think that point cannot be successfully defended, my point would be not that it is less valid, but that it is in fact ultimately the same thing – writing is an artifact of speech, which is the primary means to communicate with other humans.

Wheels within wheels. Fascinating stuff!

@ipso Those are some interesting links, and they do help me clarify a bit what I am interested in discussing. It isn’t aesthetics or definitions or philosophy, I don’t think. I am interested in the communicative aspect of the different artistic disciplines. In fact, I don’t even care if it’s art. I’m interested in what you can say with movement that you can’t say with color and texture and shape. What can you say with sound that you can’t say with symbols spoken or recorded on other media. What can you say with facial expressions that you can’t say with bodily expressions? What can you say in a theater that you can’t say in a lecture hall?

How are these forms of communication (and I don’t care if you call it art or not—although when we use movement or sound or images (static or moving), people typically think of those things as art) different in what they can say. How does the different forms of these communications efforts make it possible to say different things that they allow you to say?

I’m a dancer, a musician and a writer. I am not a painter or actor or movie director. Each of these different forms can be seen as a technology for communication. Seen this way, you can make the analogy to some historical events. What did the invention of the printing press allow people to communicate that they couldn’t communicate before? How did it accomplish this change? What did the invention of sound and image recording systems allow people to communicate that they couldn’t communicate before. How did these technologies allow for different communications?

In a similar way, movement is a communication technology. Writing and other visual symbols are a communication technology. Sound and sonic symbols are a communication technology. Non-symbolic visual creations (paintings, drawings, sculpture, fabric, etc. etc) are yet another communication technology. I’m sure people can think of others.

In my experience, movement (dance) is really good at a number of things. These things include getting people out of their heads and into their bodies; development of a movement language that is understood in a more direct way than symbolic language facilitates; social communication in different social groupings such as solo, duet, and group formations.

Music also helps me get out of my head, but it’s different from dance because the logic of music is more constrained than dance is. In music there are frequencies of sound and they work together in predictable ways. This is true of rhythm, as well. You can be harmonic, or anharmonic. You can be rhythmic or arythmic. You can create melody or noise.

But when making music, I never think about the theory. I just do it. I do it because it feels like this is where the music needs to go. It is based on experience with the history of music and different kinds of musics and different kinds of performance spaces and needs. I put it all together on the fly—and while there are theoretical level thoughts going on, for the most part, I seek to banish those. It feels much better if I am the music instead of the music’s creator.

With music, I can create emotional spaces in one way. On the simplest level, think happy or sad—major or minor keys. With dance I can express emotions. I don’t think I can create emotional spaces. With writing, I can describe images—I can show emotions and not have to tell them, although I can also tell them. With painted or drawn images, I can use shapes and color and texture to express moods or ideas, but it is all very vague and open to interpretation in a way that words are less vague.

Sigh. I seem to be answering my own question, and I didn’t mean to do that because I didn’t want to predispose people to any particular interpretation of the question.

Anyway, @ipso, you seem to have more than a passing interest in these things. What is that interest? Is it in any way related to what I’m talking about here?

@wundayatta

“I think that writing for yourself is different from writing to yourself.”
How so? Writing is only one form of art that I participate in. How is writing for my own pleasure any different than painting a five-foot-tall mandala on my kitchen wall for my own pleasure?

If I decide to whittle a stick into a whistle, then burn the whistle later on instead of selling it or giving it away, have I committed an act of artistic insanity? What about practicing music? The musician who writes a new song plays it hundreds of times for himself before sharing it with someone else. Is that any different than having a conversation with yourself out loud, over and over and over again?

How far does your “bullshit” call go?

@wundayatta – You wrote: “I’m interested in what you can say with movement that you can’t say with color and texture and shape.”

Maybe that’s like saying what does green say that knurled metal does not. You’re mixing domains. You’ve entered the arena of philosophy.

Frankly – and please try not to hate me – I think dancing is gay.

come on, that was funny

Especially movie dance scenes: horrid, atrocious, pathetic, ludicrous – all of them. I go “floppy-indignant” at the very thought of a manipulative cheeseball dance scene. The ‘dance scene’ is America’s most profound cultural failure, but as a cultural artifice, it is not entirely useless – it can always serve as a bad example.

I assume the original purpose of dancing is to exhibit physical fitness and prowess, but it’s been rapped and pillaged and bastardized by the entertainment industry to the point of no return. Burn Hollywood Burn.

So actually, maybe I have more than a passing disinterest in this subject.

However, “movement” is something entirely different to me. My first thought is watching the elegance and prowess of certain basketball players, or fighters, or any athlete really. Dwight Gooden comes to mind, and Orel Hershiser.

I think this photograph is the most important piece of art I know of. Even after a couple of decades of having it up in the garage it is still shocking amazing to me. He is a god. A great thing is the number of expressions on people’s faces.

I’m always mesmerized by his left hand too. His form in this shot is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Michelangelo’s David.

What it makes me feel is raw awe. Heroics. Like looking at a dramatic mountain top and feeling like somehow it’s a reason to keep living just to experience it. Music can achieve that kind of awe. The written word certainly can. But generally, “dance” can only achieve disdain and disgust from me, for its derisive mockery of a real meaning.

@ipso – oh, my “I don’t think it’s compensatory” comment was in regards to your response, “Fluther taps into a kind of dream state, where you compensate and practice for “real life”.

So to clarify, no I don’t think fluther is a compensation for real life. I use it to support my real life (by asking questions that will help me in my theatre work and teaching); and recently I had a fluther friendship that has extended beyond fluther. It is probably true that typing on a screen may be more expressive for certain personality types (see this question), but that’s probably another thread.

@lifeflame – Congrats! Rock that Fluther fluff.

@ipso Yes, dancing is gay. That’s why men have their own non-dance dance forms such as basketball, football, pitching, karate and other martial arts, gymnastics (oops, probably too gay for you), etc, etc. All movement is dance. It all conveys more meaning than just the movement itself. It is all about communication. Watch how people walk down a sidewalk sometime. See how they are saying different things by the way they walk. Yeah. Walking is a dance. Ever see a military marching color guard or marching band? Is that gay?

In any case. So what? Any problem with something being gay?

Actually, the purpose of dance is to show fitness for leadership. Ballet, for example, was developed in the French courts as a way for courtiers to compete to be closest to the King. Why do you think all these powerful men are eager to sign up to be on “Dancing with the Stars.” Or whatever it is.

But dance serves many purposes. It can be competitive, but it can also be cooperative. It can be a way to bind communities together. It can be a way to court a lover.

The movements you like speak of strength and talent and agility. They are good talents for warriors. That these are the things you admire says interesting things about you. Perhaps you want to be that way. Perhaps you are jealous? Perhaps it is a sign of manliness for you. Who knows? It’s just interesting, though, in the possibilities it raises.

Movement can say these things. Words may say them, but the effect is not nearly so powerful. I’m not sure you could paint them, but you might make a sculpture that speaks these things. Music, which you also like, is strongly associated with martial activities, and it can create that feeling of strength and excitement and readiness that the physical movements of athletes also suggest. Of course, the sound of a person’s footsteps was the first musical form. The sound of a thousand footsteps marching in unison creates this notion of power and strength and can put dread into anyone who opposes the army.

Interesting stuff.

@wundayatta This is where you lost me: “All movement is dance”. Dancing to me is moving in accompaniment to real or imagined music. Everything else is just that.

A deft master whittler does not “dance” with his wood. Jr. does not “dance” the ball out of the park. Even though the vid has music, Dan Osman does not dance up a mountain side. Etc.

Yes – ballet is gay. I don’t have a problem with gay. It’s funny, not threatening.

My hang-up with dance entertainment is the contrived aspect – where producers of various entertainment mediums pathetically attempt to manipulate the emotions of the audience in some kind of faux antiquated vaudeville throwback dead language that is dance. In such a format it is usually ludicrous, cliché, trite, and/or abominable. You wrote “It all conveys more meaning than just the movement itself.” – indeed.

I completely get it from a tribal standpoint. In the book I mentioned earlier Levitin discusses the fact that music and dance were really the same thing – they were thought inseparable – ubiquitous – and that every single person in the tribe did it. He visited a tribe and they asked him to sing and dance with them, and he was hesitant saying he was not good at it, and they laughed at him as if he had said “I do not breath”. His point was that only in the modern era have we acquiesced these important human traits to “professionals in halls”, because they have achieved an otherwise unobtainable level of expertise. I might have my wires crossed with Joseph Campbell though. He has some great work on the subject as well.

Dance is definitely a courting ritual. Women instinctively want to dance, presumably because they want to show off their bodies and be seen. That’s a truly unique aspect of dance. Men begrudgingly go along with it to get laid. As far as what else dance communicates, I think it’s obvious we may never see eye to eye. I’m sure you’re fine with that.

Can you give examples of really good stuff that may persuade me to understand better – given my expressed limitations? I love certain artistic images of dance, but the actual movement itself seems to me all prep for certain key poses. I particularly love this and this shot.

I could give 1000:1 bad examples though.

@ipso Your view of dance is quite limited compared to mine. In fact, the pictures you show are to me an aberration more than they are dance. I do enjoy the ballet, but I would never want my children to do it. It is unnatural. It is torture. It expresses little that is real.

Dance, I believe (and you are right that we have very different understandings of the term), is built on everyday movements, repeated and exaggerated. Native American dances imitate animals in many cases. So does Tai Chi. Walking is a dance. Whittling is certainly a dance. Even more so because it is repetitive.

But it’s kind of beside the point to discuss this. I don’t want to persuade you to see things differently—it’s not something I could do, and I don’t really want to describe what it’s like, because I’ve done that here numerous times. If you are truly interested, you will try out different kinds of movement—try Barefoot Boogie in your area. Or the Five Rhythms work. Or do Karate or Tai Chi or play football.

See how it makes your body feel. See how you relate to others differently when moving as opposed to speaking. Shut yourself up and let your body do the talking. Do yoga. Do meditation. Anything that gets you so focused you forget your linguistic mind, and are working with other parts of your mind.

Some people might call this a transcendent feeling. Or a spiritual feeling. Those are words that don’t explain anything. You have to feel it yourself or no words will make sense.

So, let’s call it movement instead of dance. My question is what does movement express that speech or visual arts or theater (which includes movement) or music cannot? How are the different modes of communication unique in terms of what they can say and how do these different modes facilitate the ability to say different things.

@wundayatta @ipso Dance is generally accepted as a stylized art form of movement, generally for the purpose of expression. Music is not a prerequisite. Other movements, such as the dance of the honeybee, the mating dance of various birds and animals, and the dancing waters in various entertainment venues. There is also the dance of sunlight through the tree leaves and water over a falls. Some accelerated pictures of plants growing look very much like the dance of life to me.

@wundayatta – What you describe I call “living”, not “dance”. Dance is occasionally a good analogy for all that movement you describe.

Walking is not dancing.

Comparing the vastness of movement and life to our relatively itsy bitsy verbal and visual representation in art seems… folly.

The emotional value of reaching over and holding your small child’s willing cheek (what I call life, what you might call dance) is quite beyond words or art. It’s like comparing Google queries of “apples” to live parakeets. It’s like trying to use a screwdriver to take a transmission apart. It’s like reading a Rolling Stone article about a concert vs. having been there (vs. having performed the music!)

I’m not selling words short. In some cases at the museum I enjoy the wall plaque descriptor of the art far more than the art itself. I enjoy stories and pictures of Mexico far more than I do actually going there. etc.

Good luck in your quest though. I don’t mean to gum-up the works.

@ipso Interesting. It sounds like you are saying that one aspect of the communication via movement is that the impact can only be known by experiencing it. To try to explain it provides only a tenth of what is there. I.e., movement is kind of like a big fat pipe to the internet whereas words are just dial-up.

Let’s look at it the other way around. Are there things you can do with words or writing that you can’t do with movement?

Let’s expand it. What can you do with movement that you can’t do with images or visual artifacts? And vice versa.

And you are on track with the question, not gumming up the works at all!

Ipso’s MRV model

Movement: sex, going really fast on a race track, doing a backflip on a snowboard, hitting someone as hard as you possibly can while playing football, more sex, wheelie a mountain bike a block, do a stoppie, and then trackstand. Make and partake in two of god’s holy sacraments – coffee and pancakes.

Reading: Go to the moon and eat its blue cheese. Fish on the Mississippi in 1865. Kill the bad guy. Learn about new restaurants via friends. Explore the future.

Visuals – some great examples are already linked ^, I’ll add Wright, Turner, Frazetta and this great costume

1 – Maybe writing is an example of Movement and Reading: Write love letters, relive our own luxurious yet rough and tumble past, “visit” with distant relatives vs. traveling to see them.

2 – Maybe Cinema is a cross between Reading and Visuals, and comic books, and the Internet.

3 – Riding your bike down a beach path is Visual and Movement, or driving your car through the canyons, or playing with kids and “capturing” amazing visual moments of intrigue or folly.

And what shall we put in the warm fuzzy center?

I’m about to go up to the Getty Center museum for the rest of the day and try to experience Movement, Reading, & Visuals all at once.