For this week’s piece we are shifting gears a little–the artist is still Becky Phillips, but the work is drastically different from her Higgs Boson themed series “Sublime Encounters: Science and Art Collide.” The medium is not paint on a canvas, but something quite different. For her piece “Eye Interrogation: Highbrow/Lowbrow,” Becky interviewed a demographic of people from a local upstart art collective in Bryan, which she described the group as “idealized and implosive.”
In an interview Becky revealed that she “wanted to keep the questions simple.” Her “interrogation” was mild to say the least. She asked interviewees “Do you think art is important?” and “What do you expect to see when you look at art?” After interviewing them she cropped the video down to just the eye so the viewer could easily detect any signs of artificiality. What she found in watching the video was that people knew that they “should appreciate art,” but didn’t always “possess the vocabulary or knowledge to communicate their perceptions of art.”
The final video, which can be seen in the SEAD Gallery, is overlaid with video of forms of transportation, which represent progress and development. Come down to the gallery to see if the video challenges your own perceptions about art!
Art certainly does change. It does not progress in the sense that it gets better and better.Ancient art–even going back to cave paintings made 10,000 years ago–can be as good as modern paintings. I am not even sure, any more, that civilization progresses. It certain small areas, like the wearing of seat belts, it seems to progress, but with global warming, species extinction, and pollution of the environment, we seem to be heading downward fast. Progress is a 19th century concept. The modern science of ecology demonstrates the planet is in trouble.