{"id":199,"date":"2006-09-08T18:37:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-09T02:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/08\/art-is-a-cat\/"},"modified":"2014-09-03T15:48:21","modified_gmt":"2014-09-03T23:48:21","slug":"art-is-a-cat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/08\/art-is-a-cat\/","title":{"rendered":"Art is a Cat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Modern art has always been my favorite kind. (I&#8217;m using the term &#8220;modern art&#8221; very loosely here, to refer to all art created roughly from 1950-present, not just by the modernists.) I&#8217;d much rather go to a gallery and see what new artists are creating today rather than go through stuffy old <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seattleartmuseum.org\/SAMcollection\/code\/emuseum.asp\" target=\"_blank\">SAM<\/a> and see the same &#8220;old masters&#8221; yet again. When Steve and I were in Paris, we skipped the Louvre and went to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.centrepompidou.fr\" target=\"_blank\">Pompidou<\/a> instead. Locally, we&#8217;re members of the excellent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.henryart.org\" target=\"_blank\">Henry Art Gallery<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m hard pressed, though, to find the right words to explain why I like modern art so much, aside from saying I enjoy the mental\/creative stimulation it gives me.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why I enjoyed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.villagevoice.com\/art\/0637,saltz,74400,13.html\" target=\"_blank\">this article by Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz<\/a>. His main point is to criticize &#8220;academics and theorists who&#8230;belittle art as a gratuitous&#8230;merely beautiful&#8230;amusement&#8221; (I removed a bunch of extra words to highlight his point) but in the process he does a good job of describing the power of art.<\/p>\n<p>He ends with this clever metaphor:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<ul>Imagine calling two pets, one a dog, the other a cat. Asking a dog to do something is an amazing experience. You say, &#8220;Come here, Fido,&#8221;? and Fido looks up, pads over, puts his head in your lap, and wags his tail. You&#8217;ve had a direct communication with another species; you and Fido are sharing a common, fairly literal language. Now imagine saying, &#8220;Come here, Snowflake&#8221;? to the cat. Snowflake might glance over, walk to a nearby table, rub it, lie down, and look at you. There&#8217;s nothing direct about this. Yet something gigantic and very much like art has happened. The cat has placed a third object between you and itself. In order to understand the cat you have to be able to grasp this nonlinear, indirect, holistic, circuitous communication. In short, art is a cat.<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I recommend reading the rest of the article as well (it&#8217;s not just clever metaphors).<\/p>\n<p><em>Found via the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestranger.com\/blog\">Stranger Slog<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Modern art has always been my favorite kind. (I&#8217;m using the term &#8220;modern art&#8221; very loosely here, to refer to all art created roughly from 1950-present, not just by the modernists.) I&#8217;d much rather go to a gallery and see what new artists are creating today rather than go through stuffy old SAM and see [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animals","category-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":698,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameiskate.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}