IDEAS

A MANIFESTO

on the question of art and free expression

By Michelle Kim

How free is your brush?

Art is an activity that seeks to give shape to human emotions, beauty, and ideals. In order to be genuine, it needs full freedom of expression. The influence of art on human life promotes cultural diversity, yet it is not simply a tool to express ideas. Art often can focus people’s minds. It can solve and question difficult social relations that plague our society. Not only that, it can create new ideas and values that can go beyond conventional ones. The position is that art should provide lessons and examples to enhance human morality, that art can be aimed at cultivating the potential of a more loving and moral audience. That’s certainly very utopian and I’m sure we would all like to see this.

But there are limits to this politically and morally motivated conception of art. If we accept that art should and must be autonomous, then there is a possibility that it will violate moral standards. The goal of art is not to judge one person’s particular moral values over another’s, but to create aesthetic value. Therefore, when discussing art, it is impossible to evaluate it as right or wrong and at its purest level it has nothing to do with morality or ethics. Art should be allowed to be autonomous from trends and social customs, and should be judged only by aesthetic values.

To be really free

Artists are always plagued by existential dilemmas. Whether the art is coming from a painter, a composer, a sculptor, a novelist, or an animator, there can be pressure to conform to the "political correctness” of the times, whatever that might be at the moment. Usually, the fight between conventional dogma and anything else ends with the triumph of dogma...Art is different or so we might hope.

Art rarely ends up in a landslide victory on either side. It is more often preoccupied with a tug-of-war between these forces. The name art is sometimes used for magical thinking that demands that we think and behave in certain ways. A genuine and engaged art almost never conforms to societal expectations. Art is about independent thought and expression and therefore is almost always at odds with the general world.

Shout it out!

Many people believe (and a lot of them are at CCA) that the purpose of art is to cultivate the right kind of human being and to provide moral lessons and examples. This seems wrong to me. Is art supposed to be an act of purpose, a piece of sociology, a mere idea? For me, art is at its best when it has no purpose.

In short, art shouldn’t be an adjunct to education. In a free-thinking world, we have to accept both moral and immoral acts. That’s the price of freedom. And if all we get from art is morality, who’s morality is it? As these ideals change with the wind and are often mutually contradictory, we should all realize that there are no absolutes. And if so, where do they come from? I do indeed believe that there are absolutes and I think that there are both moral and immoral aspects in the world, but I also believe that it is incredibly vital to the health of our world that the artist be free and not subjugated to the rules and expectations of a kind of morality police.

We need more from the world that just an idea and art provides a vital part of that.

©Michelle Kim and the CCA Arts Review