But I will just add that I think a definition of art is just that - that it requires an onlooker to be in 'dialogue' with it. The principal dialogue is between the artist and own sense of self. Art is self-discovery. It is not about selling a message (even though most of the high priests would have you believe otherwise).

The observer's dialogue is with that sense of discovery, and, in doing so, discovering themselves, and the languages that they use to mould the reality around them into something they, as an individual, can deal with.

Great art imo - even the photographically figurative - is about the spaces between different ideas and different world views. These spaces are what the onlooker fills in - trying to connect up the pieces in a microcosmic logic.

To realise, as one does with the space between a joke and a punchline, that the pieces cannot be joined together in a logical way because there are two sets of meanings - two frames that will never fit together in a perfect world. That's why we laugh at a joke or ponder a painting or drift in and out of the images of poetry. We are happy to realise that we are imperfect - we've been 'fooled'. We live in an imperfect personal world and need to accept it as it is.

The old analogue sound recording process involved passing a tape across a magnet, or 'head'. In recording, the metal particles in the substrate of the tape were rearranged by the fluctuations in the magnetic field of the head caused by variations of the electricity supplied to the magnet. Playing back was the reversal of the process, with the arrangement of the metal particles disturbing the magnetic field in the head. In other words the head was needed to translate fields into arrangement and vice versa. This has always seemed to me to be symbolic of the 'old' art process - both for the artist and the onlooker.

The endless perfect replication of everything in digital format has changed all this. I am not sure what that will mean to our accommodation of sensory experience in the future. But it's doing something!

I have said too much <gets back in cage>

 

You can't be me, I'm taken