Thoughts on the indirectness of the aesthetics of art

I was scrolling through Pinterest and was thinking about some of the pieces of art that I was seeing that looked too "direct". Pieces that were very obvious examples of design principles, like space, form, contrast, emphasis, etc. But something is lacking with these pieces and you've probably seen it to.

Fundamentally, an artist can either cater to the culture, or create the culture. When the culture is catered to, people will praise the art for looking conventionally like what the past history of art has looked like. The catch 22 here is that past artists didn't take this approach - instead it was to create the culture, and sometimes that means that people don't like what you make the moment you make it, but they usually do when you've died.

I bring this up because I feel the differentiating factor between when culture is created and when it's catered to, is a sliding scale of how direct the art was, not in subject matter but in aesthetics. There are plenty of examples of famous artworks that were topically direct - but maybe not in how the artwork came to be what it is during the process of creation. If a painting's topic is that the negative space is zig, and the focal point is zag, this is easy to understand for the culture because there doesn't seem to be a subliminal creative process behind the topic being displayed.

This is similar to how our mind works. We have a conscious and an subconscious mind, where the conscious is what thoughts we are aware of and the subconscious being thoughts that we aren't aware of. Our decisions in the real world are still affected by the subconscious mind, we just don't know how they influence our decisions because each person's subconscious is so different from each other (negating the collective subconscious proposed by Carl Jung).

The directness of the aesthetics of a piece of art past the subject matter are symbolic of an artist that didn't utilize their subconscious to create a piece of art (purely my opinion; source: my own experience, since I am an artist), because when you utilize the subconscious, the final product is something that inherently can't make direct sense to you or others, until it does. When it exactly starts to make sense is a mystery.

Some examples of where to utilize the subconscious in the easiest ways are through the flow state of creating art, meditation, or especially dreams. Dreams are not fake, they're as real as your conscious thoughts. Dreams can't just "come out of thin air", that's impossible. They have to come from somewhere, and they come from the visual manifestation of your subconscious thoughts while your conscious mind is inactive during sleep. Dreams will show you what you've really been thinking in an indirect way. There are many artists that paint their dreams because they really feel like the essence of what the aesthetics of art should be. These paintings/drawings might not be conventionally exciting the current culture, but they're not supposed to be. They are a purification of truth manifested as a physical object in the world. The truth isn't exciting, and it's really up to you to choose between being an artist that portrays your subconscious truth, and some reflection of what the world has presented for you.

=x