Freud's theory on...Art?

Freud has been revered for a very long time as a highly influential member of the psychological, and therefore the artistic and philosophical, worlds. However influential he may have been, and whatever doors he may have opened to others who followed him, Freud’s theories are generally regarded as oversimplified and generally groundless. With the exception of his breakdown of the psyche into the Id, Superego, and Ego, most of Freud’s principles have been outright disproved or attributed solely to the fact that he did enough cocaine to numb a small herd of elephants and had more issues than most of his case studies.
With that said. He oversimplified art and did what he usually did with all his other studies: tried to make it fit into his model with rational sounding, but insubstantial evidence.

Beauty vs. Pleasure....Reason vs. Emotion

“The definition of a beautiful woman is one that loves me.”
- Sloan Wilson
As Mr. Wilson clearly demonstrates here, beauty is transient. In a world where anthropology tells us how often obesity was held as beautiful by previous cultures, where the male form was upheld over the female form, where extreme piercing and gauging of cartilage is a common practice, there is no simple way to say that beauty is linked to any one physiological or psychological response. Pleasure is a very dangerous criterion to base beauty on. Especially since some of the most beautiful things in this world can be characterized by the pain that they cause. Admission of fault or failure, the ecstasy of grief, the finality of death, are all beautiful things that cause little or no pleasure to the actor or the observer. Therefore, beauty must be something entirely different. Since it seems so transient, and we are continually exploring things as counterintuitive as the beauty in the grotesque, perhaps beauty is something more akin to the act of connecting to something conceptual, something behind the imitation that Plato held in such disdain.

Communication of Emotion

As I’ve stated several times before, art is a powerful form of communication. And Tolstoy’s discussion on art as more than the mere expression of emotion is quite cogent. However, his ideas tend to imply that the communication is transference of emotion rather than a communicative dialogue. By portraying anger, the artist doesn’t necessarily have to be meaning the communication of anger. Rather, he opens up a channel for a mutual dialogue that may extend to several types of emotions and paths of thought. Successful art is less a simple communiqué and more of an invitation to dance, each participant, artist and audience, contributing his or her emotional steps to the overall movement.

Art as Imitation

Art is imitation. It is impossible for it to not be. Too often art is revered as something sacred, when in actuality, art is the conduit through which something sacred is touched by humanity. Art simply imitates the idea that it represents. Even in the most purely expressive forms of art, connected most directly to an intangible concept, art is still just that, an expression of something else. To say that the forms that art takes are also limited to imitation alone, however, is a statement that has been proven false. It is undeniable that when dealing with things such as theater or painting or music, there is a trend of adherence to form simply because “that is how it is done”. Yet even working within conventional forms, as long as the intangible, the divine connection is current and accessible, the art is attaining the nearest thing it has to avoiding imitation. Art can avoid imitation of itself; however by its very nature, it can never avoid imitation of the divine.

Perception

More important than an optical illusion that somehow tricks our minds into thinking squares are different colors or that one object is larger than another, is the commentary made by these things on how our perception can have a definitive effect on our interactions with the world around us. Will we somehow treat the square on the left different from the square on the right because of our perceived difference in the color? Do we prefer to be sinking in the ocean or falling into the sky when dealing with a horizontal line? And what does the answer to that question say about who we are as people. Pure objectivity is simply impossible due to the fact that our perceptions are our only conduit to the world around us. However, by examining our patterns of perception and attempting to hold onto an openness to varied perception, we may better grasp the truth of a grander idea that an art piece may be hinting towards.

What is Art?

Art is communication. Art is affection and affliction. Art is a mirror, and the image reflected back, and the light that does the reflecting. Culture does not exist without art. Whether it is the art of theater, the art of painting, the martial arts, or even just the art of communication, art must exist for people to have any kind of identity. It takes forms that may be very strict, as in the great classical painters, or the sweeping Wagnerian operas, or it may also exist in an amorphous and nearly intangible state of Bacchanalian chaos. Whatever its form, art distills something that is inner, something that is purely energetic, some might say even divine, within us, and manifests it so that it can be shared and given life outside of the individual or individuals that created it.
However, just as art is the manifestation of an inner spirit, or Mana to use an aboriginal Mexican term, it is also the action of tapping into a concept or spirit that is outside of oneself, that is greater than an individual or a single cultural context, but rather is shared on a human level and therefore universally communicable.
Art is an epic film with millions of dollars of financial backing, and it is the found object puppet piece that uses a pencil and a bottle to tell an improvisational story to a single child.
Art is expansive and restrictive. It can be something that seeks out the unifying aspects of all people, or it can be the defining lines of an isolated society. It is a herald and a catalyst of social change. Art is the Revolution. Art is institution and the convention, as well as the dissident and the experiment. Art is love incarnated with an arm made of hatred and an elbow made of ignorance and a wrist made of clarity, a foot made of wanderlust, two eyes of curiosity, a stomach of understanding, two palms of compassion, and genitals of desire. Art is what you make it and art is what art makes you. Art is good, art is bad, art is ugly. There is no substitute for art. Art is a prostitute. Art is a pimp, our President, and the bag lady in the alley. Humanity is art. I am art. You are art. And this post is most definitely… art.