Anchorhead said:Vaderisnothayden said:Art is not about sending messages.
Art is almost always about sending some type of message. By it's very definition, art is visceral. It is a creator's way of expressing thoughts or emotions so that others might also experience or understand them. You may not dig the message, and in fact you may even be offended by it, but it's not an abuse of some higher, pure medium.
Even the most base or serene paintings are the artists' way of saying something about whatever it was that inspired them. Just because a piece isn't a Basquiat, that doesn't mean it's not sending a message. The same goes for any form - sculpture, music, writing, film, etc.
Artists don't go to the trouble because they have nothing better to do that day. They create because something moved them emotionally and they either want to share it, warn against it, or preserve it. Whatever their reasons, it's a message.
I've already made it very clear that I'm not talking about that kind of sending a message. I spelled it out repeatedly in three posts. Art is about communication but that doesn't mean art should be made into a political pamphlet in which everything in the work is subordinated to getting up on a soapbox and beating a message into the audience's head. You can have unintentional messages, intentional messages and plenty subtext without doing that. Art is about human nature, human feeling, imagination and the deeper recesses of our minds. To absolutely subordinate that stuff to beating out a political message is to abuse art. Art can communicate so much without everything in the work being subordinated to the purpose of a political message. And even some works that by and large subordinate themselves to a political message can manage to work as art, but it is very easy for a work that's all about the Message to be a debased work in which everything that's art about it is undermined by preaching. Preaching is not what art is about.
(A note: I keep going on about a political message, but it can sometimes be other types of messages that fuck up art that way.)
Also note, getting offended by a supposed work of art being turned into a preachy political pamphlet is not about whether you're offended by the message itself, it's about being offended by that being done to a would-be work of art with any sort of message.