Hit the art museums in Milwaukee and Chicago over two days. The way I do art museums, any museum, is I look at everything. I am tired when I am done. I am definitely arted out. It was useful though.
I had many thoughts, but will only share one tonight, as I am tired. Walking through the South Asian section of the Chicago museum, it hit me that “Art is that which organizes culture”. It does not create it, per se, but it organizes it.
Medieval churches were artworks, as they organized culture. City planning, on this rendering, becomes a type of art, since it organizes culture.
I once dreamed of living in Tibet in an endless winter. We had a shrine (my wife and I) where we had to go down a very narrow, chimney like tunnel, then crawl through a very narrow tunnel, at which point the room appeared, underground, that was spacious. You had to have that sense of contraction to fully appreciate the release. It was dark, too, now that I remember, and only slowly lit by those already there, and of course filled with iconographic images. First time, the tunnel filled you with fear, but the whole gestalt worked at cultivating a state of mind, which is to say a state of culture. It was an artwork.
Speaking and writing, on this rendering, are also acts of art. They organize how we think about ourselves, who we are, what we believe together, and what we want to do and why.
I will offer this as an open question: what has been the organizational effect of most modern art, say since the Cubists?