Monday, December 31, 2007

What is a great art?

I have found that my idea of art and its impact on the audience has changed over time. I understand, this is quite natural and most everybody else also experience this changing attitude towards art and its effect over time. It's just the other side of the fact that I get moved differently every time I read, say, the play Daakghar (The Post Office).

Art, no matter what form, needs to move its target audience emotionally. We - this term may need some elaboration, but please take it on the face value for now - tend to over-analyze art. I even feel that sometimes we go to some concert or play or read some book just to analyze and critique the art. And in the process we forget to enjoy it. May be, on a subconscious level, we are thinking, "I may not be an artist but I am a critique who can analyze and tear apart any artist's work - main hoon baap kaa baap".

What I said above is not directed to anybody in particular but me. I few months back I realized this sad fact that the gratuitous critic in me is coming in the way of my enjoyment and the art. My training and knowledge in some form of art, namely music and drama, is not helping me either. During an intense dramatic moment of a play, part of my mind is analyzing the blocking, the lights, the actors' business and so on. While listening a new song, my mind gets unnecessarily concentrated on the arrangement of the song, the chord progression, the crispness of the recording. In the process the dramatic moment and the song is gone, probably forever. The first experience never comes back.

I am actively trying to correct it since I found this lacking of mine. And trust me, it's not easy. Apart from untraining and retraining my senses and mind, there are some more philosophical dilemma to sort out. The biggest of them is, "Just because an art moves me emotionally, should I call it a great piece of art?" I tend to answer a subjective "yes" though I am fully aware that some second rate tearjerkers can and do move me emotionally quite often. And of course there is the other side too, where a piece, which is considered great art by many, failed to impress me at all. However, I rationalize that by accepting that it may be a result of my improper training.

The bottom line of art appreciation is training. Most of us are self-trained in art appreciation and most of us are smart enough to separate wheat from chaff. The problem is with the borderline staff - the staff that cannot be called great at the first experience nor cannot be pushed aside as crap. A great art will move you emotionally as well as give you enough food for thought that you ruminate for a few days, if not weeks. A crap art will give you neither. The borderline case will give you some. Unfortunately, the world of art is full of these borderline cases. And the fact that it is majority in the world of art forces us to bring out the critic from inside us more often than it forces us to just sit back and enjoy. That's a sad fact of thinking life.

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