What is Art?

My writing has wound down lately, beside a few entries in this blog and my journal it has ground almost to a halt. I have hidden it in the folds of life like you would an article in a notebook, something important to keep but not urgent enough to be dealt with now. Largely its been a matter of not knowing what to write. I want to listen to Julia Cameron and write what I think about, but would the same register of 30 or so thoughts really make for entertaining reading. Deciding that I needed to fertilize my mind, Greg and I went to the Andy Warhol exhibition at GOMA Brisbane on the weekend.

The show was absolutely exhilarating, it was like being in an amusement park, grocery store, celebrity party and gallery all at the same time. I had intended to use Warhol to illustrate my essay titled 'That's not art, What is art?'. I was inspired by a Christmas camping trip conversation about art that centred on Andy Warhol's soup cans and how they could not possibly be considered art. Warhol certainly was the father of pushing the limits of art, he once said that art galleries are like department stores. There are several connections you could draw, art as commodity, the mass marketing and consumption of art, I like to think that he meant that everything can be art depending on your context and by context I don't mean a gallery I mean your mind. It liberates art from something that needs to be housed in a gallery shrouded in the complexity of art history and transforms our everyday into art.

I want to the write the essay from a really personal perspective, like a conversation you would have with a friend as you walked around the gallery, but the conversation is stuck and I can't seem to get further in my mind that the paragraph I have above. I have so many things to say but no fluid way in which to say them. Cameron says writing is so much more the act than the words and I know that I have to just sit down and write. Thus I am making the declaration here and now that I will write a little each day next week and post it as as I go.