Today’s Wordsmith offering of the the day is “manichean.” How appropriate. I stumbled upon a YouTube video in the very next email; a couple of talking heads trying to define “what is art”. “Is this or is this not?” They proceeded to posit that any particular artworks might or should fit into some true or false construction. The tubers manufactured 90 seconds of verbal haze by wandering into the hapless and a useless muck of rhetoric by attempting to answer their own wrong-headed question.
My shirt is red: false.
My shirt is not red: false.
Symbols and representations of reality can be visualized in pure red. But when I say my shirt is red, that is not precisely what I know to be true. If I photograph the shirt, and use Photoshop to sample colors, a few pixels may approach pure ff0000. The vast majority of pixels will fall within a gradient field of mostly rosy pinks to burgundy; saturated or not, imbued with slight reflections from nearby objects. My eye sees even more variety than this electronic tool. My red shirt is really a rainbow shirt, and if I don't know that on some level, I'm going to have a difficult time representing fabrics in a painting, or even understanding art.
The reality of a red shirt is like the reality of art. Unlike RGB colors, It’s impossible to pin down essential attributes of art once and for all. To be honest, many people would say the extremes edges of RGB (black and white) are not really colors at all. The same problem arises when we try to define Art by ideal example, Art will always defy simple, universal descriptions. It is impossible to reach agreement on what is best. Rhetoric can categorize and simplify, but it is an inept tool for describing the broader subtler realities.
Art gets to the heart of our human reality; that’s it’s special power. Art is truth.









