It Is What It Is

There seem to be two perspectives on art, the perspective of the artist and the perspective of the audience. On the one hand, if the artist says that it's art, then it must be art. On the other hand, if I look at something, and I like it, I might call it art, and who's to say that it isn't? This leads us to another question: If we define art as the product of an artist, how then do we define the artist? If we define the artist as someone who produces art, and we define art as the product of an artist, we are just going around in circles. I asked you once about what a guy needs to be able to call himself a scientist, and you said that he would need a college degree and also need to be accepted as a scientist by other scientists. While that may be true of scientists, I don't think it applies to artists. Not all artists have college degrees in art, and not all art college graduates are artists, are they? It seems to me that this whole art thing is subjective. If I say it's art, and you say that it's not art, then it's art to me but not art to you. If they had some kind of government licensing of artists, I don't think that people, even liberal people, would accept that. It seems that, if you try to restrict art and put it into a box, it defeats the whole purpose.

Then  there are the critics. I don't think there are any qualification requirements for that job. Anybody can be a critic, and the world is full of them. Some people get paid to be critics, but that doesn't stop others from doing it for free.

I think that, once you publish something, like a song or a movie, you lose control of its interpretation. You might have intended it to mean one thing, but it might mean something different to some individuals in your audience. I don't think you can copyright something like that. You can copyright the product, but you can't copyright the interpretation, and you certainly can't copyright feelings.

Maybe the Universe is like that too. God, or whoever, created it, but even He can't control what people choose to believe about it. Well, maybe He can, but He just chooses not to. I have heard of a guy who came up with the theory that the whole Universe is composed of holographic images. To me, that makes about as much sense as that turtle theory. How are all those holographic images projected? Is the projector also a hologram? If so, then what projects the hologram of the projector? I'm not sure what you mean by your digital versus analog question. I understand that there are people who believe that the Universe is composed of data, not substance. Is that what you're talking about? Personally, I believe that the Universe is made out of real stuff, but I don't suppose I could prove that to the satisfaction of anyone who believes otherwise.

I'm not so clear about the nature of time. On the one hand, there's the regular time that we measure with clocks and calendars. On the other hand, there's the time that Einstein talked about being a function of space and gravity. Of the two, the regular time is more useful for the routine conducting of human affairs. It may be just a fiction of our own construction, but it works, and that's good enough for me. But then there's the way that time seems to speed up or slow down, depending on how old you are and what you're doing at the moment. What's that all about? We have discussed that before, and have identified a few theories about it but, to my knowledge, none of them have ever been conclusively proven.

When I was young, I thought I had all the answers, but now I'm not even sure that I have all the questions. It seems that, every time I find the answer to one question, it just brings up another question. Did you ever watch that quiz show "Jeopardy"? They give you the answer, and you have to come up with the question and, if you don't phrase it in the form of a question, it doesn't count. I always thought that was a dumb way to run a quiz show, but I think that it's the longest running quiz show on television, so they must know what they're doing. Wasn't Socrates like that? He would ask people a question and, whatever answer they came up with, he would just ask them another question. It must have driven those old Greeks nuts, because they eventually sentenced him to death for it. Then they thought better of it and left his cell door open so that he could escape, but Socrates drank the poison hemlock anyway and died. I suppose he did it just to prove a point. I would never go that far to prove a point myself, but that's just me.