Campo obligatorio; no debe dejarse en blanco.

Art as total empathy  - [A Sketch]

I haven't written at length here in a long time. I have been busy studying fashion at university.

In the progression of me drawing and designing for:

a) myself in my spare time and posting it into Instagram and

b) for fashion design at university

I have come to realise that Art is a moment of total empathy.

What are the terms here? you ask. I define them in the following way:

Art: the experience of a psychosomatic feeling of being overwhelmed by emotion. Something others might have called the sublime. The moment the body feels literally and intellectually, an overpowering sense of empathy, all triggered by piece of cultural production, intentional or unintentional.

Empathy: is the understanding and personal identification with others feeling through one's own emotional vocabulary, or the identification with their cultural production. Empathy becomes enmeshed with Art, once at its centre, the sublime is experienced personally and in total isolation.

*

I have been thinking about this definition for a long time. And I like it because it jumps the problematic of art being a)static and b)classifiable and storageable. This is, Art is more a moment in which someone has experienced the sublime in their body, triggered by some cultural production. What makes it art, is not its technical aspects for its completion, or its classification as art by institutions and other authorities. But the fact that its experienced at an specific time by a specific individual.

That is why Art resides inside of us, instead of as a form of agency to be triggered by inert matter in us. Or some word/discipline with some sort of magical agency.

That is why Art is also empathetic. Because it brings emotions in us and through us, triggered by the surrounding conditions. Its hypercontextual, culturally and materially (same thing). This is reminiscent of the idea of art being a representation of our zeitgeist.

And to end this sketch. I used the word total, because I wanted to emphasise on the idea, that a strong sense of emotion, is total, uniquely intense, and overpowers the body momentarily and exclusively in isolation. A perceptual overload of emotional charge.