{"id":49,"date":"2025-06-03T09:01:49","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T09:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/?p=49"},"modified":"2025-06-03T09:05:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T09:05:09","slug":"what-does-art-mean-to-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/what-does-art-mean-to-me\/","title":{"rendered":"What does art mean to me?"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-field-notes"],"acf":{"subtitle":"Framing subjects with intent","feature_image":50,"summaryexcerpt":"As I went about my week, I wrestled with the question posed by our tutor: What does art mean to me?\r\n\r\nAt first, in my journal, I wrote a list of words - aesthetics, language, expression, communication, challenge, mind-expanding, objecthood etc. I began to imagine a geometric form, like a dodecahedron, with each side bearing a word, a concept.\r\n\r\nBut as I moved through my routines and subroutines - riding the London Underground, filling a skip with house-clearance junk, pausing to watch a pigeon bathe in the fountain outside the Saatchi Gallery, enjoying a cold beer on a bench outside the Butcher\u2019s Tap in Chelsea, getting caught in a shower, or simply working - I kept questioning whether that was it. Was art all those things? Or none? Could I reduce it to one essential meaning from which all others would flower?\r\n\r\nThat line of inquiry reduced my earlier list to two central ideas: expression and language. Which comes first? Does one precede the other?\r\n\r\nLanguage is a tool to communicate, to convey. But you can express without it. Much of our emotional state can be understood beyond o\r\n\r\nr beneath words. So, is art expression? Is all expression art?\r\n\r\nI circled the subject - now standing on the platform at Waterloo, watching the noticeboard for my train \u2013 concluding that not all expression is art. Art requires framing. It needs a context, or at least an interpretation as art. Even as I tried to distil meaning into a single word, the meaning began to expand again.\r\n\r\nI began to see that intent matters - but that intent doesn\u2019t always originate with the maker. All things form by and through expression, but they are transformed into art through recognition as language - as symbol, as sign.\r\n\r\nThat recognition can come from someone else entirely. Take Marcel Duchamp\u2019s Fountain: a mass-produced urinal, reoriented and signed \u201cR. Mutt, 1917.\u201d Is it art? And who is the artist \u2014 Duchamp, the designer, the factory worker?\r\n\r\nNow, at the end of the week - standing at the kitchen counter of an empty house, with my laptop and an empty coffee cup \u2014 I\u2019ve arrived at a conclusion:\r\n\r\nArt, to me, is expression framed by language and symbol, independent of time.\r\nThis framing gives it shape - not a static polyhedron, but a spinning globe , with ideas and concepts connected through a network of songlines that can stretch, one day, beyond the stars.","featured":true,"themes":["Text"]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53,"href":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mosys.art\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}