Art As Object, Live With It.
In this Golden Age of Egotism, you’ll hear people say art is a process, not an object. Nonsense! All of what is justifiably called art is always and ultimately an object. It may be transitory, as in such temporal arts as live performance, but it is always a thing out there in the world, no matter how briefly and irretrievably. Art is not about the artist doing something. It is about what is done. The artist is really irrelevant. What matters is what he or she has created.
Artists create art out of a vast and diverse variety of things. For some it is ideas from science or from a different art form or from history or from accidents. And yes, for some (especially writers), it may be from personal experiences and emotions. But it is what they make of these materials that matter, not the raw materials or the act of making. We need to disentangle the creator from the thing created, for the artist’s importance really is only as the delivery boy: it’s the package that matters.
