All art, even controversial or NSFW pieces, deserves to have an audience!
What defines art, as opposed to simply globs of colored matter attached to a canvas, is its audience. It’s a cliche that art holds up a mirror to society, but in reality, it is society itself that has created the mirror. Indulge me making a cliche even more cliche for a second:
The only difference between some naked person running around a park flashing everyone in sight and a picture of him doing so is the picture can be viewed by those who define art, whereas the person will run off into the night never to be seen again (except maybe in a mug shot). I’m not making a moral argument as to the ethics of flashing people, but rather the functionality of how we view art. And I say view because that’s really all that matters — our view. Without divulging into subjectivism or subjectivity or arguing that our perception is warped in a certain way, I wish to simply acknowledge the fact that everything we see, particularly art, because its sole purpose is to be viewed as music is to be heard, is purely a reflection of whoever made the piece. And given that so many have come before us, it’s often a reaction to the most immediately previous movement which was, in turn, a reaction to its ideological predecessor.
Now, that doesn’t mean all art is derivative or that the only truly original work was a chicken or an egg, but it does mean (at least in a purely mechanical way) that if art were to be interpreted by a much wider audience than it generally is, it would be viewed differently — in the same way, that the result of an experiment or poll changes when you broaden the sample size. However, with an experiment, the goal is to identify the trend line or mean that emerges from the noise. With art, however, there is no such predefined goal or hypothesis. Perhaps there never will be a discrete purpose or unit of measurement for art, but because we now live in a world proliferated by social media that links things you like with other people who like those things thus created contaminated epistemic bubbles the very proof of which you need not look further than this LED-illuminated word… we must at least attempt to look further. Given that you have had to audacity to read a few more words allow me to explain how one might go about breaking bubbles.
Our goal is to give art that is restricted on other platforms the voice they deserve and to properly accredit and compensate the artists who venture into the grey area of acceptability in our society. There are emotions as well as physical states we all express at times, but never discuss in public or consider as art. Much of what differentiates art from randomness is the artist themself or their bizarre and innovative process. Art should be judged for its merit as art alone and therefore our new platform: Grey Area Fine Art works to give each artist the opportunity to use a pseudonym or remain fully anonymous — a feature no other NFT platform offers. While it is not possible to view art through every lens, with the implementation of the same social media strategies and mechanisms, used to drive us into herds we can forge an ultimate criterion for Grey Area Fine Art as one to give all art the opportunity to be seen and heard.
For example, much of what does determine art has to do with the artist. Their particular style, personal choices, and timing within a movement all come into play. We tend to categorize. Usually, generalization is helpful to us (or evolution would probably have gotten rid of it by now), but in the case of art where being different itself can cause a paradigm shift, and by that, I denote a new movement, the new movement will inherently be viewed through the lens of the old until enough momentum is generated to turn perception. Therefore, we ought acknowledge our own perception and read the room the art is placed in before deciding if it is, in fact, art.
With the Grey Area Fine Art project, we hope to give art its fullest possible audience and eliminate any sample bias from judging the art as the artist. Join the discourse and disagree with me to help prove my point.
