Living Contradictions

A Living Contradiction Art is a language. Art is a contradiction. It universally speaks for us and goes against two conflicting ideas people come up with. Art has its bad and good effects. This so happens to create various meanings towards art and how significant it turns out to be. The logic behind art's opposing sides is introduced in Oscar Wilde's "Preface" to The Picture of Dorain Gray Art, Plato's Republic VII, and Kenneth Koch's On Aesthetics. These authors show how simple and complicated art can get, which ends up creating contradictions for itself. Art is its own consequences where creativity lies because it expands the mind in different directions, whether in the light or dark path. It becomes our friend and our enemy, depending
In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, he states, " 'Anyone with any sense,' I said, 'would remember that people's eyesight can be impaired in two quite different ways, and for two quite different reasons," which supports the fact that art can be interpreted in many ways due to it's contradictions (101). Some argue that art was brought up for a reason, while others believe that it has no purpose at all. That's the process of how two meanings are formed because of the different ways we view certain things, just as Plato states. In some cases, people will argue that art was just another random act in our world that was brought up because it just so happened to be created without any reason. The contradiction lies within people's state of mind, thinking that art is here for a reason because as everyone says "Everything happens for a reason." We probably gave art a reason to live, when in reality it could have been an accident that somehow that changed our lives. The other contradiction lies in the meaning art is given by people who define art to have no definition. Sometimes art shouldn't be forced to serve as a specific function because many people tend to overanalyze what it is. On the other hand, since people find a reason for everything, it is possible that art does have a purpose. The purpose being a form of escape, freedom, a creative outlet. Art has become important to us because it is our comfort zone. It welcomes
Sometimes having a language, despite the different nationalities, makes us feel superior to animals. In reality it doesn't because animals have their own language as well. That language is a part of our nature because it's the matter of interacting with one another, not to feel more intelligent and higher than the rest. In Xu Bing's Case Study of Transference, there is a picture of two pigs having intercourse, one with imprinted fake Chinese characters and the other with fake Latin words. The art in this piece is the fact that although animals don't speak or talk like humans, doesn't necessarily mean they don't have a language. People forget that having a language is a form of interacting with one another, just how art allows us to communicate and make connections. Bing's art distinguishes the differences between nature and civilization because, besides the fake language, when people view the piece, they get embarrassed for seeing the pigs do something natural. He also mentioned that, "The pseudo languages helps us to imagine a universe beyond language," which shows the contradiction in his artwork because Bing emphasized his piece of the meaning behind the things that are given a meaning, which shouldn't be overthought so much. This relates to one of Koch's poems, "Aesthetics of Feet", stating "To move together/ Even when we're apart"