Mindstring Thoughtflow

Monday December 12th, 2005

Here's a string of thoughts that occured yesterday while I was trying to work on my Critical Writing final portfolio (this is how distractable I was!). I jotted it down after it went through my mind because for some reason I realized it had happened, and similar strings happen often, and I wondered if other people think like this a lot, and I wonder if in the future I will continue to do so, or if I'll read this and remember what I used to be like "back then."

. . .

Staring absentmindedly at the vase of flowers on the table next to the laptop.
There are green flowers.
Unusual.
Someone must've been considering it as it was being made, and decided it needed green.
Remember Japanese flower arranging--a super-high art in Japan.
And similar highly-developed skills like that.
There was a "try your hand at it" for flower arranging in a Pitt Arts program awhile ago.
Such a high art in Japan.
The "great masters" at work.
Subtle, deep.
What if some student at the program made a great arrangement, by utterly unencumbered comon sense and good luck?
I picture affectionados and experts gazing in wonder.
It wouldn't have been made with that subtly and care and intention.
Unfair?
Possible?
Thinking about high arts in general -- appreciating them requires so much.
Do those criteria reflect common sense beauty at a deeper, more developed level?
A judge painstakingly picks the winning arrangement...
Would a normal Joe look at it and say it was the best? Would it stick out to him?
Should that BE the case with true judgment of true art?
I've thought before about someone from a totally non-Western background, totally untouched by any of our art, going through the Louvre. Given some time to look and think, would they pick out the Mona Lisa as the best painting? Would it be picked by a majority of such aliens?

So I sat there and chewed over whether high arts should be able to be appreciated by normal people, whether the art deemed excellent should appear excellent to a non-affecionado, and whether the great works of art would stand on their own if we weren't told all our lives that they were great.

All from noticing green flowers :-)

And if anybody has comments on this issue about art and such, I'd be quite interested to hear them. I really don't know myself. Part of me wants to think that any reasonable person should be able to recognize great art fairly readily, but part of me thinks that the very things that make such art great preclude its rapid or uneducated recognition as extraordinary.

--Behrens

[Mindstring Thoughtflow would make a sweet progressive rock band name!!]