Safe Art
December 5th, 2006 Fred McVittie
The phenomenon of ‘art’, as a recognisable experience of human beings, has a number of overlapping and related psychic features. These include aspects of aesthetics, social production, function etc. but a significant feature is the primary categorisation of a particular object or event as ‘art’. This categorisation is what allows the various other processes to become operative. Without the initial allocation of an experience to the category of ‘art’ other processes either do not come into play at all, or do so in a variant form. An analogy may be drawn with the experience of being hurled violently back and forth in a moving vehicle, narrowly missing other vehicles and travelling at high speed down perilously steep descents. In a car this would be a terrifying and possibly immobilising experience, whereas on a fairground ride this would be classified as ‘fun’. The basic physical action is the same but the categorisation of the experience allows other responses to come into play. Many of the original responses may still be in place; we may still experience fear, but these responses are located in a category of experience which recontextualises them and allows them to be interpreted in other ways. When we categorise an experience as belonging to the domain of ‘art’ (by prompts such as frames, galleries, etc) we are orienting ourselves such that a particular set of responses become available, and possibly that other responses are suppressed. And just as the context of a fairground ride produces its variant responses by ensuring the experience is actually safe, so the context of ‘art’ allows its responses to be made by making similar assurances. The exhibition in the gallery my be terrifying, or perplexing, or minimally stimulating, or seductive, but it is also, ultimately, safe, providing us with an opportunity to contemplate, feel, absorb, or process in other ways the events and objects in front of us.
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