Welcome to The Varsity’s All Arts Magazine, the fourth in as many years, and one of the most ambitious we’ve attempted. For the first time, we’ve built the issue around a distinct question, one that challenges any and all expressions of human creativity.
“But is it art?” is by no means an original question, and when considering the theme of this issue we were never under the impression that we were pursuing something profound by posing it. I would like to think that many people have embraced the idea that anything can be art and anyone an artist. With that being said, the question still provides an ideal platform for exploring new, obscure, and contentious forms of art. It allows us to learn why those who engage in them not only think that their creations should be identified as art, but also believe that potential exists to create great works within their chosen medium.
Some of the pieces may surprise you. Erene Stergiopoulos’s exhaustively researched “(Art)ificial Creativity” accentuates a novel development in the ever-shifting artistic paradigm. Does a human need to be the one holding the paintbrush (or any implement of creation for that matter) for a piece to be considered art? Where would human creativity be left if a machine could mimic the process perfectly? Her article transcends the issue’s original question and explores a key aspect of the human.
In one of the more polemical contributions, Jakob Tanner examines the inextricable relationship between creativity and wealth, asking if this is an ultimately harmful association. Through a series of interviews, he finds that it would be spurious to categorically claim that wealth has either positively or negatively affected art — there are, as you will see, many more dimensions to contemplate.
As for the Found Art Scavenger Hunt, I don’t want to spill too much ink on that here — especially since Emily Kellogg has done such a fantastic job elucidating the goals of our little experiment — but let me assure you that the small group of us who participated in the project discovered that suffering is certainly an important element in the artistic process.
I want to thank all the writers and copy editors who ensured that the content was top notch, and the design team who worked tirelessly to create a visually stunning magazine. It’s been a long weekend (and not the good, day-off, sleeping in type of long weekend) but the final result was worth the stress and sleep deprivation.
You may not agree with all of the points made by the writers and those whom they interviewed. But I suppose that’s inevitable in the subjective realm of art and it reflects one of the more bizarre aspects of our relationships with the creative works of others. There’s a certain kind of pleasure you derive from being repulsed by an aesthetic you dislike and endlessly arguing with an intransigent friend about the merit of a particular work. So I hope you don’t like everything you find here, but I do hope that each story evokes some kind of reaction — be it positive or negative.
Sean MacKay
Features Editor, 2010-2011
The Varsity All Arts Magazine production team hard at work
