Yes, But Is It Art?

Smelly masterpieces: Why is great perfume not taken more seriously?:
"Why is great perfume not taken more seriously? While many art professionals are very serious about many branches of literature, architecture and music, I have yet to find a curatorial colleague who regularly beats a path to the fragrance counter in search of, say, Joy Parfum, the 1930 masterpiece by Henri Alméras for Jean Patou, which, if it were a painting, could hang beside Matisse's nearly contemporary "Yellow Odalisque" in Philadelphia."

As if to add fuel to the "What Is Art?" controversy, comic-book legend Stan Lee was awarded the United States Medal of Arts this week, an award granted by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Excelsior!: Stan Lee Wins Medal of Arts Honor:
"In the 1960s, Lee built the success of Marvel Comics on the backs of his famous characters: Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men, among many others who are still followed today by millions of fans. Rather than mimic his contemporaries with stalwart, righteous super-heroes, Stan Lee created flawed characters who instantly tapped into the growing pains of his readership."

Perhaps this new perspective on what constitutes "art" has something to do with the following:

Is Google Making Us Stupid?:
"As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our "intellectual technologies"--the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities--we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies . . . The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network's reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web--the more links we click and pages we view--the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements."

I don't think the Google changing our brains issue is good or bad, it just is. This instant plugged-in nature of our society is bound to affect the way we view the world around us, and that includes broadening our ideas of what is (or is not) art.

If great art is meant to have a deep, lasting impact on our psyches, if not our souls, then who can say that comic books don't belong in that category, especially when you consider the enormous psychological pull comic books have exerted on popular culture for the last fifty to sixty years.

And if you talk to someone who deeply appreciates perfumery, you quickly come to grasp the lasting emotional and intellectual influence a good perfume can exert on its wearer, if not the people around him/her. It's almost like the ultimate in abstract art -- you can't see it, hear it, touch it or taste it, but it shimmers in the air all around an individual or space, creating pockets of inspiration and expression to walk through, around and upon.

I don't agree with the author of the Google article that our continuous and near ceaseless technological interfacing has flattened our intelligence into nothing more than a reflection of artificiality, but I do agree that technology, and in particular the Internet, is reshaping the ways we think about the world around us, including our definition of what constitutes Fine Art.