Ersatz

It is said that art imitates life. However from fiction writing I have learned that the best fiction cannot possibly follow life precisely, because that creates bad fiction. Instead art to me seems to use shades of life as its palette and then repaint an entirely different picture so that the colors used can be better understood.

I thought about all this on a day working at the bookstore when a kid came in a bought a bunch of art supplies with the intention of creating a portfolio of art so that he could get into art school. I acknowledge that there is some purpose to art school, there are various skills and techniques which can be passed on in any artform, but really as I was ringing up this guy's purchases it made me think about how ridiculous it is to be producing art for the sake of getting into a school. In my mind art had always been something that is for it's own sake, it's a form of expression.

I suppose there's no other way for art schools to see if people posess a degree of talent, however this also draws up another issue of how exactly they are gauging the potential of applicants, I'm assuming they are under the impression that they can quantify artistic ability. My problem with this is how much of art appreciation is simply taste, it seems a relatively flawed system to quantify talent and admit or omit people based upon that. Regardless, like I said, I see the necessity of it so I suppose it doesn't matter.

Last year Iread an essay entitled "Hunting is not those heads on the wall" which I thought conveyed a lot of good points about the nature of art. I thouroughly recommend it to anyone interested, if it's available online I'll try and find it so I can post a link.