“What is art for? To make us feel something” Brian Eno

Iris Murdoch observed that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify” and Auden insisted that “the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act.”

Art critic, novelist, painter and poet John Berger adds:
“I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last.”

The term guerrilla art is fairly recent but it seems that the idea of it is as old as time. One of the definitions I like best is that because guerrilla art is environmental, the surface to which it is applied being fundamental to the piece’s meaning, the art is defined by what it does as opposed to what it is.

From Banksy’s stencilled work on urban walls to craft groups’ yarn bombing there is a huge range of guerrilla art, most designed to be fleeting and create a range of reactions and emotions in passers by.

Eleanor Rigby is a statue in Stanley Street, Liverpool, England, designed and made by the entertainer Tommy Steele. It is based on the subject of the Beatles’ 1966 song “Eleanor Rigby”, which is credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership.

A cross-stitched surgical mask was attached with ribbon by a member of the Craftivist Collective. The quote on the mask is by Mother Teresa and says: “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.”

The craftivist explained, “We hope it made passers by stop and think about what poverty means and how important relationships are for all of us when trying to create a stable environment on this planet for ourself, each other and everything within it.”

Brian Eno has spent 25 years trying to find an answer to the question “What is art for?” and one of the answers he favours is “It makes us feel something.”

Do you create to make others feel something or to express your own feelings?

This is part of a series of posts on Questions about Creativity. The rest of the series can be seen at:  https://annhawkins.com/creativity