august

He puts so much work into everything; I respect him so much as an artist. He’s the epitome of how I want to approach my art and life in general. Recognising and working on your weaknesses to perfect your technique but never forgetting why you do what you and what you want to achieve. And consistently always wanting to improve and challenging yourself no matter what you achieve. His skating speaks for itself just how far he has come. I love how complete it is both in terms of the technical aspect, artistic expression and most importantly, the high quality of execution. It looks so effortless and beautiful and there’s just so much elegance and control in everything down to his fingers. The imperfections and the mistakes he makes just make him that much more real.

However, what makes art have subjective traits is because beauty is involved at its core. If beauty is not perceived, the concept of what is ‘beautiful’ doesn’t exist; beauty is dependent on the perception of others to be real. (This is why we say, 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.') The same can be said about other abstract concepts.

But how we view and categorise what’s beautiful is relative to our own experiences, views and beliefs.

What I mean to say is that there are certain fundamental traits in art that have subjective concepts and this is what makes art feel more subjective than other sectors such as education, business, politics, etc. even though they all have objective, subjective and relative traits.

For example, knowledge. A piece of knowledge can stand on its own, but we have to discern why it is relevant and why it matters. This is relative to our own experiences. The concept of 'relevance' and 'importance' in itself are subjective because they need to be perceived for them to be real.

The reason why the word relativity gets lost is because it is easy to mix these meanings up. They are very similar but they are also very different.

I also have another theory that people like contradictions, and putting things at odds with each other and boxing complex concepts into easier forms, and by doing that, lots of other things get overlooked.

Another theory is that we do end up understanding the meaning of what is subjective, but we end up categorizing the whole of art as subjective because we continue to ask ourselves, ‘what is art?’

Is art also a concept that relies on our perception for it to be real?

We end up romanticising it and thinking it’s something abstract.

My answer is that this is false. Art is dependent on the artist to make the piece of art. If the artist doesn’t make art, then there is no art and they are not an artist. Art can stand by itself and thus it has to be tangible; if it stays in our head that’s just our imagination.

At the end of the day, we also end up using art and beauty interchangeably. When we say ‘this is art’ what we really mean is that it is beautiful or it made an impression on us, etc. We aren’t wrong to use the word like this since it contextually makes sense, and we’re just adding new meanings to the word art. But we do need to learn how to differentiate art as in a profession or subject and art as an adjective or description.

Edit: I apologise because I made a massive mistake but I thankfully caught myself. Our emotions are not as abstract and subjective as beauty. Yes it's necessary for emotions to be perceived, but it's not an existential need for them to be real. Just because our emotions are not perceived, it doesn't make them not real. This makes emotions relative.

What is going to be part three? Why is critique in art important and not just ‘subjective’? lmao

This comes from my own thoughts and understanding of the world so like if you do catch anything that’s incorrect, please do inform me.

When we make art, we put in the effort to learn and craft our work and in turn, we become better artists by doing so. You can’t get better at something that has no standards. 

While there are discussions of what is ‘good art’ and what is ‘bad art’ or what even counts as art, within the different art communities, we do agree that there is a certain threshold of quality that is essential for our art to reach.

The reason why art, and in this specific case art in figure skating, often gets categorised as ‘subjective’ is because the performance is primarily meant to please us. It’s easy to say a 3A is impressive because it’s an undeniable fact and we can also explain and break down the logistics behind why it’s an amazing feat and even why it’s distinguished from other triple axels. But for the performance in itself, it’s hard to describe why we think that is amazing, why we feel such strong emotions.

“Beauty is harder to analyse than truth.”

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J Adler

Often in figure skating (basically all the time) skaters get grouped into two categories. The artistic skater and the technical skater: e.g. Yuma and Ilia, and before them, Yuzuru and Nathan. We can classify this as a false dichotomy, meaning that we either refer to them as one or the other, and there’s no other option. And it’s incorrect because Nathan and Ilia are just as much as artists as Yuzuru and Yuma are; they make/made art just like them. To add to this, before Yuzuru and Yuma were talked about as artistic skaters, they were first known as technical focused skaters who (surprise, surprise) lacked in artistry. They had to get better at art to be regarded as good at art.

So then people might say, all these skaters are both artistic and technical, and some lean in at one more than the other. And this is correct, but they all are at different levels. Better terms would be 'high bv and variety of jumps' to signify the base value and risk the skater takes, and 'high quality of execution' to distinguish differences of how well an element was performed. Because perfect technique is also a form of art.

So how can we judge the programs then? There is a way to explain the quality versus enjoyment and how we can start to practice a broader approach to the way we view them.

Here I’m outright stealing Beck’s very serious and highly appreciated Trapezoid of Literary Consumption and moulding it into a Trapezoid of Figure Skating Programs Consumption:

The reason why this is all important is because so often, art in figure skating gets diminished and seen as lesser compared to the technical aspects because of the ISU reasons such as our own emotions and the ‘subjectivity of art’ or more correctly its relative flexibility and how it's so hard to understand.

This doesn’t mean that we ourselves should be oblivious on what makes something the highest form of art. Because if we categorise everything as ‘subjective’ or ‘up to our own taste’ for everyone, we run the risk of keeping on misinterpreting, of not being able to explain why a program is special or remarkable and why we enjoyed it. We also might get overly defensive when something we like gets rightfully critiqued. And we might even overlook the efforts of people who do put in the work, who try to better themselves as artists and push themselves to not only their limits but the limits of what has already been done before.

Art, reading, music, etc. are all participatory. Most of the times, at first, we don’t know. We don’t know why we feel happy or sad, why we are keeping on looking or reading, why we aren’t switching to do something else. But there are reasons behind these points. And we should continue to actively accumulate and search for those reasons and discern what makes something pleasant or good rather than just passively consuming without understanding why. And this is not elitist or pretentious of us. We're doing what we're supposed to do; try to understand each other and ourselves.

If you are confused about anything, please say so, I’ll try my best to explain. If you’re wondering why I went on a rant…this has been in my mind for a while but a friend said, ‘art is too subjective’ and I thought this would be a more respectful answer than, ‘then why the fck do we learn how to do art?’ 

If you’re going to take one thing away from this, say relative instead of subjective. That’s what you actually mean btw