I’ve published a few blogs that point to the idea that art is about the process, the experience, and not the final result. Or maybe ones that spell it out completely.
But I had this concept land differently for me last week, like it was brand new information.
I felt this intense wonderment, like my brain was exploding; but more like an orgasm, rather than a destructive explosion. The lightbulb moment, as I would imagine it.
I call these insight moments, and often they feel like they come from outside of me, like a collaboration with Source—or at least something larger than I am. The main insight lands and then I enter this space where I can’t consciously think about it, and just have to let the dust settle. And trust me, I’ve tried to excavate more before it was ready to be evaluated by my conscious left-brain… it doesn’t work. (And unlike an orgasm, leaves me feeling frustrated and unsatisfied.) So now I just swim in the unknowing when I’m left with an insight that needs more time to unfold, and to open to me.
Experience aside, here’s what dropped in [and remember, this might still be in the unfolding stage, don’t expect it to wrap up neatly]:
What if art isn’t ‘about’ the process, so much as art is the process?
What if the term art, is actually defining the experience itself, and not the object? What if it was never defining the object?
Or what if it only started to be defined as the object with the rise of Industrial Capitalism? Seeing art as an object certainly feels aligned with our patriarchal-consumer-capitalist standards. Both patriarchy and capitalism do this well.
Objectification under capitalism is the process by which human beings, relationships, and nature are reduced to tradable commodities, instruments for profit, or quantifiable metrics. These systems of power crave definability, across many “metrics” and it strips away intrinsic human value in favour of exchange value. This deeply shapes labour, social interactions, and self-perception in our modern world. And then patriarchy reinforces the systemic power imbalances—women are reduced to mere instruments for male desire, reproduction, or service rather than being recognized as complete human beings with their own autonomy and sovereignty.
This stems a sense of having no perceived “worth” which can be something we internalize and something that is (then) applied to external world, like physical works of art.
Under a system where more intangible(-leaning) things like ‘experience’, elements that can’t be quantified, or wholly measured, or can’t have a price tag stuck on them, don’t get valued in the same way en masse.
The conceptual separation of arts and decorative arts or crafts that have often dominated in Europe and the US is not shared by all other cultures. And many other cultures have used arts (visual, performance, musical, and even story-telling) for healing, passing on tradition or myth, and many times these works of art are temporary in nature. No final product, the experience was the art.
I would even argue that systemically, and societally, we tend to value education over lived-experience. I notice this within the medical industrial complex, and am curious if this happens in the job-hiring world as well.
I think we’ve may have got this art as a noun definition all wrong.
We made art—that was our experience. The tangible item—that is a product of our creation, a product of our art. And once again, then becomes the result and not the point.
For any TGP fans, Jason didn’t quite have this one figured out, but I wanted to include this anyways, as I quoted this many times in sitting with and processing this idea and the insight that first landed.
