Middle English,
from Old French, from Latin ars, art
See also ar-
To fit together
Derivatives include army,
harmony, inert, aristocracy, adorn, hatred, rite, arithmetic, and
rhyme.
Some artists view
the world as if looking through a window at things
happening ‘out there,’ while others view the world inside themselves. Either
way, the autobiographical vantage point is implicit.
If art is about the
self, the widely accepted corollary is that making art is
about self-expression. And it is -– but that is not necessarily all it is. It may be
only a passing feature of our times that validating the sense of who-you-are is
held up as the major source of the need to make art. What gets lost in that
interpretation is an older sense that art is something you do out in the world,
or something you do about the world, or even something that you do for the
world. The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express
who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something
outside yourself. As a maker of art you are the custodian of issues larger than
self.
Some people who make
art are driven by inspiration, others by provocation,
still other by desperation. Art-making grants access to worlds that may be
dangerous, sacred, forbidden, seductive, or all of the above. It grants access
to worlds you may otherwise never fully engage. It may in fact be the
engagement –- not the art–that you seek. The difference is that making art
allows, indeed guarantees, that you declare yourself. Art is contact, and your
work necessarily reveals the nature of that contact. In making art, you are
declaring what is important.
…Carol Golden
1. Andreas
