Tagged: respect
I May Not Respect You, But I Respect Your Work
Depending on how it is portrayed and explained, a child’s amateur collage could be transformed into a work of art that is complex, deep, and enigmatic. If you step back and simply look at it, it’s a piece of construction paper with paper triangles and circles sloppily glued on, and it might be your personal opinion that it’s a disgrace to call such a project a piece of art, a masterpiece even.
But to some, the carelessly assembled work might represent the ephemeral nature of childhood, the standard sky blue color of the background might express the utility and potential of such a common color, and the lone star shape in the corner could represent the North Star that guided the escaped slaves. But that’s just me.
When you try to interpret Picasso’s Guernica, it’s probably easy to infer what scene he’s trying to depict, given that you are familiar with his background. It’s showing the personal horror and trauma that arose from the German and Italian bombing of his Spanish town. You might know from common knowledge or shallow research that the Spanish government paid Picasso to create this mural for the World Fair that took place in Paris.
However, a more prevalent trend has been lurking in the most recent years. Especially as abstract art becomes more common and there are less distinguishing factors that allow you to identify what an artist is trying to convey, the artists are becoming increasingly reliant on art fanatics’ creativity, imagination and personal interpretation skills to properly appreciate their art. Research will only get you so far, and personal analysis will bring you the rest of the way.
Thus, what people do with their money is their own business. For some reason I’ve never been able to awaken a very strong interest or passion in visual art as most other people, as it doesn’t affect me emotionally, at all. But I do know that there are people that exist that base their careers on their appreciation for art. Some people are willing to spend millions on something that looks like 3rd-grade me could have created, and for what reason exactly? Personal appreciation is a phenomenon that I doubt I will ever understand.
But as is my opinion with music, so too shall this apply to art: you don’t need to agree with someone’s lifestyle to appreciate their work. Stop hating on Chris Brown’s music. We’re not downloading his albums to listen to him talk about his ethics and morals; it might just be that I really like the loud bass to one of his songs, in which case if I decide to download a Chris Brown song, no one should judge me because I’m obviously not going to take life lessons from him.
As is the case with someone like Justin Bieber. His “beliebers” firmly believe that he is flawless, but I personally find many character flaws that I don’t want to go into detail about because I might just spend five paragraphs on it (if you really want me to, comment below and I’m happy to write a separate post about it) >:D
In my opinion Justin Bieber is overrated as a person but I really do believe (though I will reluctantly admit) that he has raw talent as a singer. Thus, I don’t feel guilty downloading his music.
As it pertains to art, I believe it’s totally to appreciate (and heck, if you have/are willing to spend money) and purchase someone’s art simply for aesthetic reasons. As long as you are comfortable with your financial decision, you should feel free to do whatever you want. You have nothing to prove to anyone…
Not only that, but it’s also acceptable to enjoy someone’s work for different reasons. While we have professional art analyzers that may or may not be right about the meaning behind someone’s art, isn’t the point of this whole experience for the artist (and indirectly, the viewer) to explore the work and their own creativity? Thus, you can probably interpret a song or a painting or a sculpture differently than everyone else seems to, and that justifies your appreciation/purchase. If you find something profound in art, there’s nothing that should hold you back from expressing your admiration of it.
My Top 7 Most Viewed Blog Posts, and My Hypotheses for Why
Preview for an upcoming post? Here it is!
This one is popular because it’s short and funny! There’s a picture of a cute duck, and most of the viewers found this through a writing challenge that I did online, in which I left a link back to my blog. Not much more to say about this post, there’s not really an underlying meaning, except I suppose to question the legitimacy of eggs, but I don’t mind eating eggs and I’m not really disgusted about where it comes from, but hey, that’s just me.
This guest post finally addresses one of the biggest themes that blogs rant about, that I have yet to acknowledge: love. Specifically, teenage love. I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about it because I know I’ll get lots of questions and pesterings from the people that know me personally, so I suppose for now the only time you’ll hear about love on this blog is when anonymous people submit their writing to me. Perhaps later, I’ll feel confident enough to state my opinion on teenage love, but for now, I think I’ll refrain from it.
This post is popular because I advertise it a lot. I slip it into a lot of other posts whenever writing is relevant, and that’s one of the best methods to get more hits on your blog. I think my teachers probably appreciate this one the most because it shows that I’ve learned something from my eleven years of English class. I made this one general and applicable to anyone on purpose; I knew people would be able to relate to it, and I guess that shows, through the amount of times it has been read.
I know why this one is so popular. For starters, it is the first “This Kid I Know” post I wrote, so no one was expecting me to be so straight up about the people that I know and respect. Secondly, I posted this on his Facebook wall on his birthday, so that definitely generated a lot of views. Perhaps Holmes liked the post so much that he shared it with a lot of friends? I haven’t asked, so I guess I’ll never know for sure. The post was short, sweet, and to the point. I know that high school kids definitely appreciate this kind of post. And they’re eager to find out who exactly this Holmes kid is. (He’s world-famous, by the way.)
Perhaps this one was pretty popular because I wrote it in a different style than I normally do. It was unconventional for me; it was more of a shot at creative writing. I wanted to test and exercise the way I could depict details, so that the reader could imagine themselves in my closet through my words. This post was a work in progress for MONTHS but one night I finally finished it after sitting in my closet for an hour or two, rifling through my special box.
I’m genuinely surprised that this wasn’t #1! Whenever I find new blogs, I always look at their About page to find out whether or not we have anything in common, and whether or not I think I’d be interested in reading their blog. An About page is basically a mini autobiography in which the writer can write anything they want, in whatever form they want to. This is their moment to hook in potential loyal followers by preaching to them what exactly it is that they write about, and why exactly the follower should make like a follower, and…follow. I edit this page a lot because I always want to get the best message across to people who stumble upon my blog.
I suppose this one has been the most popular because I posted the links on my Gchat account, and on my Facebook page, and a great portion of my friends on both social networking sites ARE debaters, so when they saw a post about something that was relevant to them, they just had to read it. This post was one of the first I had planned to write, but I didn’t get around to actually writing it until a few weeks later. At that point, we were a little ways into the debate season, and so I would be able to pull examples and concepts from the tournaments that I’d gone to for inspiration to write about in my post, as well as the seven weeks of debate camp I also attended over the summer. I think this post was popular because it’s policy debate is something that I genuinely care about, but also because debaters have a tendency to link things to each other in a flash, so perhaps it traveled quickly?
Post inspired by the Weekly Writing Challenge at Daily Post, here.
Catherine Zhang 