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Many artistic people are inspired by their dreams. It makes absolute sense. The dream world is full of impossibilities and infinities; it is the very essence of human creativity and art relies on that. There are even people who practice the belief that dreams are extensions of our personalities, our hopes, and our wishes. So, what does it mean when one doesn’t dream, or only dreams in banality? What does it mean when one wants to live creatively, but in the perfect place for it to happen, they only get blackness?

I have always wanted to pursue creative endeavors. Even being a Neuroscience student now, I only pursue that field because the brain is astoundingly beautiful. In addition to that, I still want to write a novel, a novel that would be full of metaphor and quiet emotion. Unfortunately, my dreams (or lack of) want to force me into bleakness. They say everybody dreams when they sleep, we just may not remember them. That may be true, but even the dreams that I do remember are sadly mundane. Most of the time, I wake up from blackness, but those special times when I do remember something, they might as well have not happened. My nightmares consist of me waking up too late for an exam review and my dreams find me finding an extra pencil when I thought I had forgotten one. How absolutely, terrifyingly boring.

What does this mean for me? As a child, I was full of creativity. I constantly doodled and spent hours in imaginary worlds. I loved reading fantasy novels and writing my own fantasy stories too. This reflected in my dreams as well. They were fun and exciting and scary, but it’s not the same anymore. Now, when I doodle, all I end up with is spirals and squiggles, I stick to reading classical fiction, and when I write, it only ever ends up as a personal fiction or a personal essay. I can’t get outside of myself in my dreams and I can’t escape myself in my real life. How do I move on from here when I spend every night in a void?

Maybe it is only because I’m in a transitional state in my life right now. This is the first true time I’ve ever really embraced my emotions and didn’t try to run from them, this is the first time where I’ve ever really been truly open to another person, and this is the first time where I’ve really tried to think about who I am as a person. Perhaps it’s good that I am spending more time for myself than hiding behind imaginary powers and landscapes, but I have the urge to create something that is not about myself. I want to leave my body and create something outside of it, but it has become impossible. Well, for right now, I’ll be working on myself some more. This is my farewell to dreams and the hope that they come to visit me again someday.

Today “artsy” is synonymous with Instagram photos and DIY crafts from Pinterest. Everyone is a photographer, an editor, a creator. For many people, our lives on Instagram and our lives in the real world don’t quite match up. Thanks to the world of filters and editing tools, it doesn’t take much work to enhance, so to speak, your life. This is amazing in so many ways, but it also teaches people to devalue the grit or even dullness of their own lives. Sitting on the couch watching a movie or spending quality time with your family suddenly becomes less valuable if it is not captured in photo form and social media worthy. Though your ratty sweatpants may be the most pleasing outfit, they’ll never make it onto your Instagram page. In this way, the virtual idealization of reality, once found only in television, movies, and video games, are now merging with your actual life. Instead of creating a Sims character, you are creating a self character, constantly trying to chisel a glamorized public self on the pretense of giving a glimpse into your private world. Beacause of this it’s a lot more difficult to find spaces where you can let your guard down, leave the makeup off when going over to your friend’s, for fear of the inevitable snapshots that will be taken. Posed artsy “candids” shower the pages of Instagram though the subject presumably asked someone to take them.

This changing idea of self representation is messy. In many ways, it reflects the history of art, especially photography, where the piece can appear to be a happenstance capturing of a moment in time, when really it is the product of much staging and editing (like the Jeff Wall photograph above). On the other hand, it interferes with our sense of ourselves by shaping it around public reception. Only 10 likes on Instagram seems to tell you that that particular event isn’t worthy of public sharing, and thus is it really worthy of anything? Similarly, travel seems to be bogged down by excessive photography, as if we are so fearful of losing the moment or that it will not be recognized as worthy unless it ends up on Facebook, that we end up experiencing the entire thing through the lens of the camera. Art is supposed to influence and shape the self, but the individual is not meant to shape his or herself into a work of art. Imperfection is beauty and many of the beauties of life are those outside of the frame.

For many young adults, New Year’s Eve is a fun night out with friends filled with booze, cold hands and an anticlimactic countdown to midnight where they may or may not kiss a stranger under conveniently placed mistletoe. This year I spent my New Year’s Eve at home hanging out with my parents toasting in the new year with some sparkling apple juice and watching Kathy Griffin and Anderson Copper awkwardly interact on CNN with a morbid fascination. As my dad flipped through the channels we stumbled upon Idina Menzel’s performance of Frozen’s Let it go (for those of you who have not seen it watch the link below, the money note is at 0:16).

As I heard her struggle, I cringed. I know what it is like to be on stage and have a note not go your way, yet I tried my best to trust in her technique and waited for the epic Eb believing that she could recover from one or two bad notes. Unfortunately, that note didn’t go much better. In fact, it went much worse.

After my dad changed the channel I couldn’t help but wonder if I was simply being too critical or if everyone else would notice what I considered an egregious error, and if they did, I worried about what horrible things the internet would shortly be saying about the immensely talented Idina Menzel.

Of course the internet exploded with vicious comments and so on her Twitter account Idina Menzel posted the following response:

In one way, I agree with what she says. Yet in another, much bigger way, I have a huge problem with her definition of success.

Most musicians would agree that in a performance there are more important things than the pitches and rhythms that appear on the page, it’s about making music and connecting with the audience through what is written on the page by making it real. Yet, correct pitches and rhythms must be there, otherwise the audience is pulled out of the story as they cringe and turn to their friend asking “Did you hear that? What was that?”.

I recognize that the performance was not under ideal conditions, but she accepted the job knowing that it would be exceedingly cold and the danger of a major vocal flub on such a demanding piece. Still, I do not hold it against her. What bothers me is the percentage she used.

In live theatre, there will never be a perfect performance. Notes will be botched and you have to move on. If you are lucky, the audience doesn’t notice. If they do, by the end of the performance they will probably forget about it because you will have sung so many good notes throughout the show you will erase the unpleasant memory. While one or two, and maybe even ten or fifteen botched notes can be forgiven in a performance, using Idina Menzel’s math of 3 million notes in musical and success being getting 75% of them right she would consider getting 750,000 notes wrong a successful performance. To me, that is horrifying number.

In school 75% is a C. In the engineering world 75% accuracy in your calculations means your product will not work and someone could end up hurt or worse. I believe that in music it is the same way. One or two notes can be forgiven, but not 25% of them.

The notes Idina Menzel sang on New Year’s Eve were just a few of the millions of notes she will sing in her lifetime so we can, and will, forgive them as the memories are replaced by new, better ones in performances yet to come. But it is not right to pretend that her New Year’s Eve performance was a successful one – because if that is considered success in music, I may start avoiding live productions.

In the field of Art Criticism, a term called Ekphrasis is defined as a verbal description of art.

Dwell on this thought for a moment longer – why is Ekphrasis such an important concept that it gets this fancy word-name?

Because Ekphrasis is actually the process by which we translate a work of art like a painting into a verbal statement – it is the mental process through which the artist’s brushstrokes become words on the blank slate of the audience’s mind.

Ekphrasis has existed as long as art and language have coexisted. So this begs another question – across cultures with different values, religions, philosophies, social structures – has the Ekphrasis been fundamentally different? In other words, if an art critic from the Renaissance.

Were to discover a Modernist Frank Stella Sculpture from hundreds of years later, they’d write differently about Stella’s sculpture than Stella’s contemporaries not just due to differing cultural taste, but because their brain has not been wired to even comprehend what Stella is doing.

The word for this cognitive wiring is neural plasticity –

 

Cognitive scientists have discovered that action neurons in our brains are shaped (or plastered – and I do not the drinking kind, mind you) by our experiences. This is why consistent practice develops muscle memory, the ultimate evolution of an instinctive drive which replaces our need to consciously focus on the actions at hand.

For example, the first time you drive a car, you’re freaking out about signaling and making that left turn. Today, on the ump-teenth left turn of your driving career, you’re probably texting, blasting Big Sean, and not giving a fuck – all thanks to neural plasticity.

In fact, Art Historians, Linguists, and Cognitive Scientists have combined elements of their disciplines in order to develop a theory for the genesis of art in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira of Spain. The idea, explained by Art Historian John Onians, is that the inhabiting cavemen actually carved the likenesses as an attempt to communicate, but the first attempts at visual representation were crude and exaggerated.

Other cavemen not only read the visual representations, but also interpreted the exaggerations, continuing to reproduce this mistake and create a second system of visual representation – an artistic one that evolved alongside pictorial, symbolic communication as a more visual, metaphorical means of communicating thoughts.

When Art critics engage in ekphrasis, they’re describing how a painting works – using literary terms such as irony, metaphor, metonymy, as well as cognitive concepts, such as spacial relationships, logical inclusion, and so on. Ekphrasis is therefore a powerful mental tool that allows an individual to become more self-aware of how their own life experiences and interaction with a larger culture have shaped their mind to form a unique visual logic.

With this post I hope to emphasize the value of Art History, a subject which allows us to expand our visual logic and interact with cultures beyond our own – both today and throughout history – by learning their cultural contingencies in order to understand how and why they produced the art they did.

This post was inspired by a class I took 2 years ago with Martin Powers – HA 393 – Art Language, and the Language of Art – one of the best educational experiences of my life – Take it!!!

I’ve been studying the notion of postmodern art for a television history class (taught by Candace Moore, take a class with her if you want to learn awesome things about TV!)

Postmodernism is characterized by an extreme interest in style as a means of making a statement, disinterest in any traditional form, and the conscious decision to take a variety of historical aesthetics out of context to create a mosaic aesthetic which defies the logic of consumer culture.

I want to suggest the possibility that hipster culture is inherently postmodern. Let’s note some parallels:

Style as a form of statement:

hipsters are flashy and aware that every aspect of their grooming and clothing choice stand out from “the mainstream”. Hence, rad haircuts,

super thick rimmed glasses,

ironic t-shirts.

All of these clothing items not only demand attention, but call into question why these clothings are designed and worn the way they are. In other words, using the symbolic nature of clothing to get rid of the consumer agenda hidden behind the fabric.

Pastiche (empty cultural references):

in other words, taking visual elements of other cultures and using them to create a new, mosaic-like aesthetic which is unlike any existing tradition. For example,

t-shirts with tiny buddhas on them are not an attempt to push Hinduism/Buddhism’s ideals, they’re merely using Buddha because he looks funny, different, and distinguish the hipster’s wardrobe as anti-mainstream.

That’s like…so mainstream:

The decision to parody marketing tactics through actively rejecting the mainstream. Hipsters have distinguished hair styles and clothing trends which are anti-establishment. This smorgasbord approach to aesthetics rejects traditional consumer logic (capitalist hegemony).

I want to point out something here. Hipster culture ultimately forms its own mainstream – stores and salons have started to market the hipster look. Moreover, the decision to “distinguish” oneself from mainstream consumerism requires the social resources to pursue education, which some people plagued by consumerism do not have access to.

Hence, hipsters ultimately create their own brand of consumer logic. Their contribution to the anti-mainstream, however, is still relevant. By overemphasizing style and aesthetic marketing strategy, hipsters create awareness that style can be manipulated.

This post is meant neither to hipster bash nor hipster glorify, but rather to explore the postmodern aesthetic strategies hipsters have employed, and how those crazy concepts we’ve learned in school (Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern theories of hyperreality, Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of taste and social capital) actually apply to modern day fads.