Being and Becoming

Art can be a weird thing at times. I mentioned in another post about how art can just be art, or it can teach or protest. This post will delve more into that a little. For art to be more than just art, it has to be becoming, or it has to be able to have meaning beyond it's aesthetic value. For me, many of Salvador Dali's paintings have that potential to have meaning to many people. I'm not one of them, but because there is so much symbolism in his paintings, and because he is painting dreamscapes, anything can happen and it can mean anything. It can tell whatever story it wants. The Sydney Opera House, on the other hand, is too abstract for it to have more meaning than can be gleaned from just observing it. Does that mean it doesn't have different meaning to different people, though? No, because it is a location; you can interact with it. It could a place of proposal, a place of solitude, a place of cheers, a monument from history, and more. It gets that becoming from other things that aren't art in a permanent way.

If you ask me what I think of both of them, they're both too abstract for me to get much from them. I can see where others are coming from, however.