Taste as the Precursor to Art
The artist’s experiential configuration is not an outlier within the human condition. To speak on the matter one doesn’t need to be an artist. Anyone can personally investigate the constant encounter with the precursor to art. Internally appearing as somatic translations of our phenomenological existence.
The continuous generation of emotionally charged images is not random. Meaning is unconsciously encoded in those abstract objects. Like within dreams, we don’t get to control or choose, we just see the creations. Our decision is wether we listen and work with the objects the mind is giving us. It is only a small subset of people who are aware and willing to make the choice of exploration. Because most people don’t recognize these creations as the precursor to something meaningful and real. [1]
I say real because it is nontrivial to ontologically verify what is dreamy and abstract. You’re the exclusive audience that can access and observe the insights and ideas you see that others don’t. If what you see lacks external confirmation you may doubt it’s existence. What you notice is important. It’s what you see out of all that you can see. It’s what you’re looking for. These internal generative experiences shape what you notice and what becomes important. If they have an effect they must be real.
The search of what you both like and want creates the vision of the world. It determines how you feel things should work and what feels wrong. Your sense of taste is the distillation of all meaningful impressions.
They most notably take place when inside high entropy experiences such as limerence, grief or altered states. As the doors of perception widen they expand awareness to more things than you can process. the call of intuition makes it obviously apparent that there must be something there. It clears a path through the chaos, reinstating orientation. The inner child must run the trail of curiosity. [2]
Indulging in the possibilistic instinct of curiosity. Seeing where things could go. Your taste collides with how they turn out. Because taste is irreducibly multimodal it can’t be abstracted. The inability to compress it into language prevents understanding. Feeling your sense of what works as ineffable and unexplainable can be disorienting. But getting lost is a great opportunity to free yourself of old preconceptions. To give in, surrender and trust your instincts completely. Letting things impress, touch and expose you. To enrich your sense of taste.
I think the artist devotes himself to its expression through capture. Materializing the high bandwidth experiences he accumulated. Into the only object, entity that can sympathize with him. Even though experience stands higher than art.
But i think curiosity is just one of the many drives. Memories, though high dimentional, are not enough to make justice to the experience. To illude the fear of loss of what is momentary one needs to make it timeless. To live the experience again and allow us to build a relationship with it. We pull these artifacts out of us to make them live longer than us. [3]
Giving form to them is the surrogate to understand what can’t be understood. It’s the only way to access the multidimentionality without compression collapse. Creating a free space where exploration is rewarded. To liberate ourselves from rules and appartenences. Allowing one to transcend what is fixed to access the malleable and give form to the ineffable. This is how direction and salvation are found.
Intensity can become unbearable and create the need for escape. Externalizing the internal to create distance. Allowing safer observance. It feels safer because you’re farther away from raw perception. But in my opinion the temptation to understand, find closure and give a place should be trunkated if one wants to go deeper.
Ignore the learned context. Remove imposed expectations that come from the desire to extract a specific emotion out of an artifact. Otherwise you’ll only hear what you want to hear and lose all the novelty. You can’t know in advance how something is going to make you feel. Tasting art is a grounding exercise, not a cognitive. One must let go of the impulse to control and interveene in perception. Savoring the collision of your mental configuration with the externalized fraction that is the artifact. Allowing yourself to feel the full spectrum of suggested emotions. [4]
Confront the piece virgin. No context means no expectations. Freeing oneself of filters to become open and receptive. Give yourself permission to see all there is to see. Including the space of possibility ambiguity allows beyond what just is. That ineffable space can only be felt and contemplated. Analysis collapses the state into one projection.
Personally, the most natural heuristic to suspend ego and prediction is to personify the artifact. Imagine the object contains the representation of an abstract entity with life, intentions and desires of its own. I say entity because as you get to know the piece of art you’ll discover this is not a one-way relationship. You’re not just learning about it, it is also learning about you. You should take it seriously because it has something to show you, a message to deliver. Notice the novel combinations of feelings and thoughts it evoques. That is its voice and you should listen to what it has to say.
Allow it to lead you wherever it wants. Enter the suggestible state of trance with submission. As primordial images surface to the mind. Connections form and when you live the life of this entity you understand how it came to be. How it was created, why it is the way it is. This is uniquely subjective. In the moment of recognition you make the discovery and re-enact the act of creation.
Then you’ll see that you discover as you create and create as you discover. It will be clear that they are connected and indistinguishable. This is a completely open ended state. Take the many paths to harmony and beauty and please yourself.
I personally find gain in applying to life this approach to art. The openness to see and try new paths converges to greater novelty generation. To not bound the perception to what feels safe. of what may hurt or influence you. Expand in what may hurt or influence you and give in your instincts. Notice what you notice. You don’t need to ask why thanks to the faith in your sense of taste. Also because meaning is not in the artifact, nor in the explanation, but in the encounter between you and it.
The interpretation filter expands, and with it your mental model. This enriched perception will be infected by the preferences you created and discovered along the way. It’s the collection of things that feel right and wrong to you personally. That’s your taste-based vision. To not lose it you must constantly be in touch with it. Understanding what language it speaks, you’ll be able to hear it when it whispers. Knowing its knowledge is vaster than yours, you can trust it completely.
As you create things in the world you’ll find it difficult to subjugate yourself to the lore of your own creations. They internally appear normal, obvious and infinitely imperfect. Especially as a beginner when your sense for what works develops faster than your technical ability. Sometimes others see them as impressive, and maybe you’re on to something. But as I mentioned before, what is internal can hardly be externally validated. This is why trusting your taste is essential.
The high bandwidth, meaning filled abstract objects are the real subject of representation of all art forms. That is what is conserved out of the constant flow. Tasting art means decoding the experience transmitted through the object. Ambiguity leaves space to fill with interpretation making them pluralistic. Meaning they can be of any form and invoke any form. what determines that form is exactly our taste. Just because we are not aware and don’t share does not mean that those expressions are not art. Taste is how you judge and would judge things. Since we all have taste, we all experience [the precursor to] art. [5]
Notes
[0] General note. This is not a conjecture, this is a report of my phenomenological observations and related heuristics to taste art. This piece is intentionally dense and open to interpretation. Mirroring art’s fundamental property of ambiguity I leave space for the reader to interpret this as is most useful or interesting. I deliberately blend the act of tasting and creating art and stretch the concept of taste as a rethorical tool to connect all the things i wanted to talk about. This means that ideas blur together rather than building on each other. This is a hard topic to talk about in a rigorous manner because it is based on subjective experience, which leads to unfalsifiable claims. The piece is not a prescription, but rather an invitation to the reader to explore the artist’s experience i think he may have access to and do something with it.
[1] An interesting exercise to visualize the subset of people starting from the base case. A quadrant defined by two axis that measure observance and interest. Going clockwise we get the observant and interested, the observant but uninterested, the not observant and uninterested and the not observant but interested. Adding a third axis of technical capability already highlights a smaller subset of people. One can add more axis to sharpen the resolution, like judgment, but defining those becomes hard as they are subjective and ambiguous.
[2] I don’t think peak experiences are the sole cause of such visions. But also the accumulation of seemingly unimportant unnoticed experiences that culminates in something visibly meaningful.
[3] Another common drive is getting infatuated with somebody else’s idea to the point that we need to expand ourselves to integrate such inspirations through imitation.
[4] The high prestige form of it is to learn the context around the creator and its creation. while i suppose all context is given with good intentions I believe it can impede sight of the value of the artifact. one may unconsciously take such concepts as prescriptions on how the piece should be labeled and perceived. It can also limit the pieces and artists one may consider.
[5] We generally define a subset of creations that qualify as art. The criteria seems like an arbitrary system based on collective judgment that comes from a shared taste for what is and what isn’t. but what is defined as art becomes so only after it has been recognized as so, which was made in hindsight. once somebody becomes aware of it and sees it as so. but see was it art just after it was defined as art or was it art also before others recognized its quality? many people lack the refined taste to recognize such manifestations of the mind as art. this also begs the question is art made in the moment or is it made in hindsight?