packbat: A headshot of an anthro bat-eared fox - large ears, tan fur, brown dreadlocks - with a shiny textured face visor curving down from zir forehead to a rounded snout. The visor is mostly black, but has large orange-brown ovals on its surface representing zir eyes. (batfox visor)
packbat ([personal profile] packbat) wrote2019-09-10 10:03 am
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Communicative and Expressive Art

A while ago, I was going through old Philosophy Tube videos and came upon one about seeing YouTube as communicative more than expressive. Which isn't a distinction I thought about, but seems useful to me.

In the twenty one pilots song "Kitchen Sink", Tyler Joseph describes himself as a kitchen sink. "You don't know what that means", he continues, "because a kitchen sink to you is not a kitchen sink to me".

I have, for most of my life, instinctively taken creativity to be, in the terms of this dichotomy, communication. I assumed that artists used their medium to find something that connects to experiences and understandings within themselves and others. That an author, for example, finds words to evoke sensations and metaphors in their readers, and what those words evoke in themself can be their motive for writing and their guide to writing, but not the point of writing. That words are for communication.

But authors can just as easily drop that goal. Art can be made like writing out one's thoughts in a private journal: to put something down, to get it out where it won't get lost and to get it out where one can look at it. Sometimes, as the Philosophy Tube video mentions, expressive art can be a stage in an artist's progression towards communication - an artist figuring out what kitchen sinks are the same to others as themself - but sometimes art isn't for others at all. Sometimes art is for expression.

That explains some art to me. Poetry in particular is often expressive - it might be the form in which people are most encouraged to be expressive rather than communicative. On top of that, this post is speckled with the word "others", and "others" doesn't always mean "me". Communicative art doesn't have to be addressed to that social construct of a "general audience", and often isn't - and in the same way that it's okay for art to be opaque because it's expressive, it's okay for art to be opaque because it's not for me.

Not really going anywhere with this. Just sharing a concept.