It was the end of the year 2000 and I was watching a film, I decided to stop watching it on the minute 14. What film it was, it is not important, what it was about is not important either; what it is important and it does matter is that I stopped it. It was the first time I had stopped a film because no matter how terribly bored I could be, how bad I may have thought it was what I was watching, I have always watched films in their entirety, I felt it to be some kind of obligation or moral code like staying at the end of a film in the cinema to presence the credits pass (which I may whine about on another post). Something spark in that moment, a new sense of my position as part of the audience.

It is very interesting to me how certain sayings have made their way into our common manners vocabulary, I particularly like “Thank you for your time”, here is a sentence that shows someone grateful for another person giving them a portion of the time that this person has to live and that to me is the key to this whole thing. Each individual has an unknown but limited amount of time to live. If you think of your own possessions and how you value them I presume you will pay attention to how easy for you is to get these possessions, how much or many you have and whether is your only one or even your last one. When it comes to time and how we spend it, we do have some social boundaries set around the clock, if this is the middle of the night or very early in the morning or late in the evening you would not appreciate being disturbed and anybody that wants you for anything should better have a good reason. After work in the afternoon, early evening you are more easy going and you can just spend a few minutes with somebody telling you some boring story about a trip to who cares where. This consideration that we make of our own time, as I mentioned, seems to be made around the clock but not in which position it has on our lifeline, that is, is this my first minute of life, is it my last one? I would imagine that everybody wants their last minute of life to be the most something (amazing, inspiring, calm…). With this in mind I would also venture to say that time equals life.

As a society we work in very strange ways when it comes to the demands that society makes to the individual and that the individual makes to society, particularly if the individual is not making these demands from society in general but directly from other human beings. I find very interesting selfishness, for example a neighbour that plays very loud music feels entitled to do this and it does not matter if their music is disturbing anybody because it is not often and everybody else bothers them all the time so that somehow gives them the right to play the music as loud as they want. 

With art we have a very peculiar phenomenon that I think brings us back to the main questions of what does society owe to the individual and what does the individual owe to society. I say this because we could think of an individual who enjoys painting as a hobby but may be the most amazing painter that has ever and will ever live and therefore may have some sort of responsibility in sharing those paintings, society may claim that this work should be shared all around versus the freedom of this person may overweight that demand and the individual must do whatever they want to do. In which case they would actually be allowed to do so by the big society. There is also the case of the artist that never shared their work and is received by society after the artist’s death and perhaps should have always the artist worked with society in mind or is the fault of society because that work was only discovered late or maybe it was not even supposed to be shared?

Imagine an artist who makes the work that they want to do without considering the audience for not even a second but if this artist did considered society they would not be able to do such incredible art. Regardless of this very interesting conundrum, I believe artists have a responsibility, they are attached to the work that they do and regardless also of feelings and emotions, the main concern is that art needs an audience to be such thing because it is a form of expression and therefore communication so without an audience is a lost message, it is a scream at the top of a mountain. I do not mean to deviate into the meaning of art and if it can be art something that has no audience (although the author could well be the audience too), this is about author, art and audience. 

The artist must consider the audience, the audience must give time and such price should not be overlooked, unappreciated or belittled by any of the parties involved in this communication attempt. The audience should make an effort to understand the emitter of the message and the message itself, the most interesting thing about art is its capacity to hold several layers of messages in one single space; the more the receiver knows about the topic, the message and the emitter, the more likely is to have an enjoyable or memorable experience. Not all art is expected to be enjoyed but it is meant to provide something that the audience can take with them. It is not necessary that the audience remembers this art but it is essential that they took something, it was either an enjoyable time, funny, plain fun, visually attractive, capturing sounds or stimulative in some way. None of those things do not need to create a memory but they must add to the life of that person like a game of chess which is not necessarily remembered by the person but certainly added something to the players intelligence or a good workout at the gym. 

Art is a form of communication, as such it needs an audience, without which there is no art.