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Comment by jack_riminton | Hacker News Reader

I fundamentally disagree with the premise that all art is social

Kurt Vonnegut expressed this better than I ever could in a letter to schoolkids, in it he persuaded them to write a poem then tear it into pieces without showing anyone.. "you'll find that you've already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming"

Full letter here: https://highexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1053653...

Further evidence is the 'outsider artists' who never show their art to anyone and are only discovered on their death

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Those kids, and any artist, are if nothing else affected by their environment and the culture they experience, at a fundamental and largely unconscious level.

So even the most reclusive artist is in a dialogue: with all the artists of the past several millenia ;)

> even the most reclusive artist is in a dialogue: with all the artists of the past several millenia

It's not a dialogue if they're dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue

No man is an island, true, but it's quite a leap from that to "art is fundamentally social".

And then there's another deep discussion about what is actually art. I would argue if an artist is motivated by social factors to make art, they are not really making art.

Does that mean all commissioned work (which is a ton of the work that hangs in museums) is not really art?

How is this related to what I wrote?

I assume the parent is implying that commissioned work is 'socially influenced', and thus by your argument, 'not art'...you are creating a piece because someone else is paying you to, not because that particular piece is just something you want to create.

If money is really the fundamental motivation to do something then yeah I would argue that's not art. I'm not saying if you get paid you're not making art. I'm talking about what's driving someone to do something.

Like most chefs are paid to cook but are they doing it, fundamentally, to get paid or there's really another fundamental reason driving their passion?

If someone is painting or making music for social reasons like being accepted by others, becoming famous, finding their identity in what others think of their painting/music, getting rich, etc, that's not really what art is about.

Of course this is only my opinion about a modern conception of art and what an artist is.

> if an artist is motivated by social factors to make art

Theres an entire subset of socializing/communal happenings as art called relational aesthetics tho

Maybe but I would ask what is the fundamental motivation.

Why can’t it be both? Why can’t art that is fundamentally for yourself still be fundamentally social? The entirety of the concepts, techniques, themes, etc. in any art come from exterior influences; the complex web of humanity and our history. That is inherently social to me, even if the end result is never shared.

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