Everything is Art

This title has a funny birth-story. Every year I host a New Year party where friends whom I hadn’t met on the last 364 days of the year are invited and they get drunk and end up giving me title for my blogs. So in an inebriated state, after couple of games of Pictionary and four bottles of beer down my friend came up with the concept that everything is art. Being a casual-teetotaler (someone who drinks twice in an year for reasons even she doesn’t knows but avoids drinking at “social-occasions”) I was the amused and silent witness to the whole pedagogy he followed his statement with. Everyone else was too buzzed to grasp but somehow this stayed with me. Well, alcohol turns everyone into a philosopher and writers like me exploit such epiphanies.

It's very difficult to define what is ART

Few days into the New Year we made a plan for a movie and we booked the ticket for the Friday release. When we came out of the theater after two and half hour of cinema, pop-corn and sprite in us, like the every movie goer we had that inevitable debate on the movie. As usual there was a cribber, “ I had read the reviews, I knew it wasn’t going to be THAT great”, the non-committal, sporadic movie goer, “Oh I liked it and the pop-corn was so good, also the dance number, the chemistry oooo....” and then there was me, “I think the script had been developed well. The first half was a little heavy and though the second part of the movie was predictable it managed to keep me glued. What do you think?” and by the time I finished my analysis I realized I was talking to a tub of pop-corn and a movie-review fanatic. What really got me thinking was that movie is a form of ART and everyone has their own individual take on ART!

Rating art is so preposterous because it is absolutely perception based. I might read a book and feel like its the best book ever written and you might consider it to be a causal read because the emotions triggered will be different as my experiences are different from the next person reading it. Creating a one point standardized scale for pieces of creativity like novels, movies, oil-paintings, music even food is just frivolous. I am not a fan of hard metal rock music so I would rate it a two on ten where as I would rate a blues song an eight out of ten, but then that is my opinion. So how can I expect a Metallica fan to not buy the latest CD just because I am a James Blunt fan?

Even Donut rates his own books, chew-worthy or not-chew-worthy!

In our desperate need to standardize every little thing we have lost the charm and beauty hidden in every art. Because essentially everything is art! If my bacchanal friend can find art in the funny-shaped homemade mocha cake why should I rely on Rotten Tomatoes or GoodReads to suggest me a movie or a book? Maybe for me the movie is a 10 on 10 and the “experts” have rated it a 5 on 10 but I would never find that out unless I take the risk of watching the movie and forming an opinion of my own.

So next time my friend, take the risk of going against the reviews of the movie or visit a restaurant Zomato-eaters are not in favor of and form your opinion about it. Maybe you have a bad experience or maybe, just maybe, you love that place more than your current “best rated restaurant in the city”.

So are you ready to take the plunge?