Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 41–On Art Again
This is one that I started writing without any real sense of what the punchline would end up being. I was just kind of musing on the ideas expressed in the first panel. I don’t think that there’s any one answer to what art or literature is or should be. I think it can reflect elements of the world, but I don’t think it has to. I’m a pretty firm believer in pure aesthetics as a worthwhile goal. I don’t think a piece of art has to look like something or represent something in order to be worthwhile. On the other hand, I don’t believe that pure aesthetics are the only way to view art. I think that “deeper meanings,” whatever those are, can greatly contribute to the enjoyment of art. I don’t think that these things are mutually exclusive. We can have all kinds of art from summer blockbusters to abstract sculpture to imagist poetry to romance novels to opera to abstract expressionism and even repeating-image comics. We can argue mightily over which is better, but I don’t think we need to argue too much about whether each is art. On the other hand, I’m not deaf to the argument that if everything is art, then nothing is art. I guess I see art more as a characteristic of how we look at things rather than an inherent characteristic of the things themselves.
It’s fun to think about these things sometime, although you don’t want to get trapped in an endless loop of conversations about this in, for example, a class. Believe me, I’ve been there. And the results of the argument tend to be a little bit like the rice cooker’s conclusion: unhelpful and self-serving.
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