I decide to write tonight.

What does art mean?

After all, this is an art blog. That question should be asked.

I think that we can classify art as all of the things that are cool to look at/read/listen to, and that allow us to think differently about things, but don't have a whole lot of "usefulness".

It's hard to create an effective business model or build a bridge with a photograph or an essay.

I can inspire those things with art, but creating them is not considered art.

That stuff is work.

Why?


When I make a photograph, the process of creating it is a lot more satisfying than having a cool print. And showing a cool print to people is way more fun than making it.

But I would never go buy a print, or make a copy of someone elses. Even if it was the coolest thing in the world; it wouldn't be mine.

However, when doing Calculus, I'm more than happy to take someone elses work. All I want is the finished product. The answer is all that matters. The journey to get to the answer is boring and tedious, and I do everything I possibly can to shorten the ammount of time I spend journeying.

But it takes just as much intelligence to solve a calculus problem as it does to create a photograph. Perhaps more.

But it isn't art. It's work.


What if we took math, or science, or accounting, or elctrical engineering, and started doing it in ways no one had ever thought of before.

What if all the accountants got their books together, got a lil high, and tried to be accountants in a creative way.

I've always been told there is one way to solve an equation. One right answer. That "this is the correct data that you should have gotten from your experiment if you did it right." There's one way.

But what if i thought up a new way?

It's almost impossible to make myself think in a new way about Calculus. Mostly because calculus is a very complex system, and people have been thinking about it for so long that they've pretty much figured out all of the ways to do calculus effectively.

But art is viewed as ever-changing. There is no right way to do compose music, or paint, or photograph.

Why does math have to have a "right" way and a "wrong" way?

Culturally, we have put a schizm between art and science. It is a hindrance to the advancement of the sciences, particularily math. There are free-thinking scientists out there, but they don't stray very far from the roots of their given fields.

What if science and art were the same?
What if instead of telling people how to find x, they were left to figure out what x was themselves?
What if science exepermiments is 5th grade were truly experiments, and not step by step instructions to find data?

What if there wasn't a "right" way to get the answer?