My World View: Why my art is art

As a painter, an abstract artist, I might be expected not to take this view. However I assert that my paintings are well-made objects, using good sound materials and methods of manufacture for the support or substrate (canvas or board) and good artist materials for paint and mixing media.

My abstract mathematical designs have a theoretical basis, many (if not all) requiring advanced mathematics for their proper understanding (that is, topics not included in elementary mathematics courses). The colour schemes of my abstract mathematical designs are chosen so as to have interesting, and mostly almost universal, effects on the viewer; in doing so they illustrate somethng about the way the human eye and brain perceive and interpret things, and thus have some interest.

All these considerations add to the justification of my claim that these new paintings are indeed art. If none of them applied — if what I did was not of lasting materials, had no ideas behind it, had no interesting effects on people who looked at it, — then something else, something aside from all these aspects of work would need (in my view) to be adduced before I would accept it was more than fatuous "eclectic relativism" to claim that something was art.

As I have described my current line in art, one should be able to say something about every type of art that most people interested in art can understand and to some extent share. Debates about whether ephemeral art (anything that deteriorates fairly rapidly) and any other particular category of non-traditional work is "really" art will no doubt continue for a long time, but the proposition that anything any person says is art is thereby rendered into art by assertion is not one that I accept in those terms, even though some artists have said it of their work and that work can be said to be art by my vague definition of it (example: Dadaism). In short, there has to be some other je ne said quoi about it too.

However, it is quite difficult to find anything that would have no interest; but let me try. Suppose that at a certain art school a whole lot of people took it into their heads to offer as exhibits dirty breakfast plates festooned with cobwebs. The first person who did so might claim some interest. But even if a few others could find variations, such as dirty curry dinner plates, or floor fluff instead of cobweb; when the tenth one came along offering a dirty plate with some household dirt across it, one would be entitled to say: "this is not art; it is merely evidence of failure to do housework!"