I'm interested in art and culture.
Here's my favourite piece of art of all time, the Artemission bronze:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemision_Bronze
I guess, if you look at it from the wrong angle it looks just like a dude with
his feet planted apart, like he's about to take a shit. But, look closely and
you see that he's in full motion. His right leg is twisting behind his body.
The heel is raised and the toes are pushing down hard to put the full strength
of his body behind the throw. His left leg is pivoting on its heel. The toes
are pulled back as he turns his torso. He is leaning back, slightly to add his
weight to the power of his muscles. His left hand is extended in front of him,
so that he can swing it around like a pendulum, and add momentum to the throw.
He is throwing a weapon- and dancing at the same time.
This is a bronze statue so it was made to stand on its own two legs, without
any props to keep it upright. That is the biggest shock of all. A living,
breathing man would keep himself upright in the middle of this whirling move
by pulling on his mucles to maintain balance. And yet, here's a lifeless chunk
of bronze that has caught this man in the middle of all this pulling and
twisting and pushing, and dancing- and it's standing upright, balanced an
unfalling.
The artists who created this piece must have spent hours upon hours, days upon
days, studying the human form. They must have sat at the palaistra (the
public gym) observing the young men of Athens competing in javelin-throwing
for ages. Until they learned how the human body comes together, how it moves,
how it balances itself; how it _works_. Then they went off and transferred
this knowledge into bronze. And now, thousands of years later, any human can
look at the bronze and see what they learned.
This is what makes humans, human. To be able to look at the world and know,
and learn, and then put this knowledge into a form that can reach through time
and speak to other humans, and communicate this knowledge. To touch another
human's heart and mind through time and space, even after you're long gone. To
leave something behind that says "I lived, I learned, I created".
So, yeah, I see the value in art.
But modern art, like Jackson Pollock, that's a steaming hot pile of shit that
means nothing. There is no skill in it. There is no knowledge. No study. No
insight. There is no thought or emotion. There is just the cold hard glint of
gold in the eye of the so-called artist and those who sell his garbage on as
art to people who only understand the value of money, and have no other value
in life than money.