Art

'Ars longa, vita brevis est' – but I suppose when it comes to the crunch, most people would rather have a bit more of that scarce commodity, life, than some arty-crafty existence in other people's minds....

Art, a disciplined activity that may be limited to skill or expanded to include a distinctive way of looking at the world. The word art is derived from the Latin ars, meaning »skill.« Art is skill at performing a set of specialized actions, as, for example, the art of gardening or of playing chess.
Art in its broader meaning, however, involves both skill and creative imagination in a musical, literary, visual, or performance context. Art provides the person or people who produce it and the community that observes it with an experience that might be aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, or a combination of these qualities.

the urge to create art has been a human characteristic for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. think red-ochre handprints on cave walls.

what must it have been like ... someone accidentally got iron oxide or soot on her hand and then casually leaned against the side of the cave, and voila!

Art is an innate organic, and universal language which is timeless. To the artist it is an essential release of a visual message, to the observer it is an automatic reaction of the pyschological process of perception. Art is to life, what salt is to food.....

»Art« is a word used by a particular civilization in a particular time. Previous/other/future cultures recognize the phenomenon differently. As a concept it can really only ultimately limit perception. But wait! Perhaps art is not a concept !(what a concept!) but that borderline/front where perception is advanced, increased, where reatlity is created ex niliho through perceptive power.

The drama begins to unfold with the arrival of the corpse at the mortuary.
Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed – transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture. This process is known in the trade as embalming and restorative art.

Art must have absolute freedom in the coice of subject. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past.