DISCLAIMER: This article was originally posted on Odyssey.
Recently, I had been creating experimental artwork with photography and software programs; as well as posting them on my Flickr account. Though, while they may appear to be of a Warholian quality, they do pose an interesting idea: Even imperfections in the art can still make good art.
To produce eye-popping art, it would involve a lot of juxtapositions that are necessary to create connections which were not even seen, to begin with, and which trigger a completely different response from the viewer. Notable examples of these connections being made are the cover artwork of Metallica\’s album \”Load,\” which features a really obscure image of a red blob on a black background, looking like it was swishing about underwater; and their other album \”Reload\” contains what looks like a burning sky. It turned out that both covers come from artworks titled \”Semen & Blood II\” and \”Piss and Blood XXVI\” by Andres Serrano. The titles are quite self-explanatory.
I do not think I would ever go THAT far to create art, but I do think that if it attracted a world-renowned band like Metallica, then there must be some sort of significance that abstract art has. Specifically, the viewer would assign that significance to those artworks by conceptualizing the images into many symbolic variations which deviate far from the actual sources of the artwork. In the headline picture for this article, it looks like a forest, with all the green surrounding it, and there is what looks like the brown stem. Or considering how there is a lot of reds and greens in the form of dots, the picture looks like a Christmas-themed picture.
The reality is that the picture is actually shredded paper, with mixtures of modifications from the editing option in my default picture viewer as well as from PowerPoint.
Perhaps, the appeal of this type of art is to push creativity to its limits as well. This may be done in order to capture nature itself without any preparations or coordination. In other words, what these imperfections are able to encapsulate is the truth, with no filter or need to put everything into place, for everything has its own place.
In the case of the popular YouTube gaming channel, Monster Factory, they seek to push the limit of character creation in video games. What they do is customize a character, but attempt to extrapolate the gaming mechanics to the point where the gaming bugs start to show. This is mainly done for comedic effect, but this was analyzed much deeper by YouTuber Kyle Kallgren and written about by gaming journalist Film Crit Hulk.
Considering how limit-pushing is what makes art, this makes another point that nothing is useless or a mistake and that everything can be made into infinite artful manifestations. This would make any seemingly useless object, as the cliché phrase goes, an \”art form.\” The iconic face of abstract art, Andy Warhol, knew this most definitely. It isn\’t simply because of their existences in themselves, but how they can be manipulated in order to elicit a profound reaction by the viewer. In plenty of cases, it would become commercial. When I first saw those Metallica album covers, I did not think about the sources of where they came from, rather what they were trying to evoke.
Kyle Kallgren points out that Monster Factory, through their pushing the boundaries of video games, seek to create many narratives beyond the one they were already presented within the video games. In my case, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then my pictures write out a myriad of stories deciphered from what anybody would see upon first glance, as well as seeing the gestalt upon further inquiry.