synesthesia. god bless you.

The first thing this article made me think about was anesthesia, or the insensitivity to pain. honestly, i could use some right now. this whole notion of evoking the senses through color and representations through blobs and what-not is a little much for me to handle. I'm an Ayn Rand sort of guy, and she keeps it real and attainable. Art is the selective recreation of reality based on the artists metaphysical value-judgments. In other words, "i think life is like THIS." And if that means life is like a tower of sponges or a spiraled pubic hair on a bar of soap, who am I to judge.

Carol Steen's red blob on black confounds me. This is what she saw during an acupuncture session? Thanks for sharing.

OK, it's time for me to take a time-out. It's time for me to turn off the judge machine and open my mind... my only concern is that I don't let my brains fall out. Synesthesia in art appears to be nothing more than a psuedo-scientific lark, attempting to empirically deconstruct the response of the perceiver. Good luck with that one. And here's a great quote from the article (wikipedia, no less!): "Perhaps the most famous work which might be thought to evoke synesthesia-like experiences in a non-synesthete audience is the Disney film Fantasia, although it is unknown if this was intentional or not." I can assure you, it was not. The Disney animators concretized (vis a vis Mickey and ballet and hippos) the evocations of some classical pieces of music. The artists were simply saying "I think these songs are like this. Now go buy tickets and popcorn." Let's keep it real, folks, and keep our artsy-intellectualism to a minimum.

But it does open up an interesting can of worms: what is the artist's obligation to the audience? Is it her job to evoke emotion? Is it her job to incite? Dunno. It seems to me that it might impossible for an artist to say "this is what life is like... to that guy over there." If we remove the individual from a work of art, we strip it of it's soul. Or is that artsy-intellectualism talk? I'm such a hypocrite.