Rules in Art

If you’re just stumbling across this article now, I advise reading the updated version. It serves two purposes… to discuss this topic, and demonstrate the power of cutting to strengthen your work. I have left the old version up here only so people can see both.

Yesterday I was serving as a mentor for a small group of Boy Scouts who were interested in learning about photography. During this “class”, one of the “students” started making assertions that his lack of understanding of the concepts of photography was irrelevant, because his choices were acceptable, because it is art, and I cannot tell him what his art can and cannot be.

I’ve been an artist throughout my life, and occasionally flipped my obsession between one artistic medium and another, and while I’ve always assumed that each art form would be completely different, I have been surprised to find that certain things are consistent between them. This philosophy of “There are no rules to art! It’s art!” turns out to be one of these.

And when you think about it, it makes sense. Art is not like math, or chemistry, or physics. I can’t simply solve the “art equation” and then plug the a paint color back into the formula to make sure it works. I cannot simply combine blue and green with a spark and suddenly have water. I can’t throw a bucket of paint out an airplane window at five thousand feet at two hundred and twelve miles an hour and get a Picasso.

And because it is difficult to say that “this multiplied by this other thing equals art” and because it is quite possible to follow the rules of art and still have crappy art, people conclude that art must have no actual rules, and there’s some other dark magic happening. They further conclude that anyone who tells them there are rules is some sort of snake oil salesman, or some talentless hack who needs a crutch like rules to allow them to create. And, unfortunately, like any theory that dons the sheepskin of logical thought, there is some small amount of deceptive truth in that.

Let me give you an example. I don’t like most of Picasso’s more famous works. I think the images produced by Ansel Adams are mostly a yawn-fest. I summarily refuse to watch another Star Wars movie because I think anything beyond the original three are utter crap. And yes, that is including Force Awakens and Rogue One. And no, it’s not just because of freaking Jar-Jar.

But lots of other people love that stuff. Minus Jar-Jar. And here I sit, with a lot of experience in writing, and a good sense of what good writing in a movie is, but everyone looks at me like I’ve got six heads when I say I think Star Wars sucks, and even more so when I try to explain why.

So there you go. And therein lies the sinister bit. People love the thing that I decry as garbage, and I decry it as garbage based upon some sort of structured set of rules that I feel has meaning, but people keep going to Star Wars movies” and enjoying them. (Picture me shaking my head here.)

You see, in developing art, we’re developing something to elicit some sort of reaction from the viewer, but unlike things with more hard-line rules, such as “I need fire”, we are ultimately looking for any reaction that sparks interest in the “consumer” enough that they will want to consume the art we have created. And human beings are, frankly, a lot more complex than a block of wood to which we apply spark.

Wood is simple because trees are simple. Some form of seed germinates in moist dirt and sprouts a happy little tree. The tree grows for some period of time, surviving through the various cycles of weather that are common in that part of the world. Then, eventually, someone cuts it down and burns it. Sure, some trees burn better or worse in fires than others. Some are better suited to fine furniture or making baseball bats. Some trees are more commonly used for housing materials, but ultimately the tree life-cycle seed boring life” hacked down” cut up and used for something else.

People are not simple. There’s no possible way to articulate the lack of simplicity of the life of a human, or even some sort of average aggregate of them, because they are, in almost every way, the polar opposite of trees. People are affected- even before they are conceived- by their parents, where they live, their culture, their relatives, their financial status, their schools, their heredity, world events, cosmic rays, and lots of other seemingly random elements of chance that happened before and during their entire lives. For example, did you all know that every human being alive since the first atom bomb was dropped all have a certain biological fingerprint that no human born before that time had? It’s there. All of these things contribute to who each of us are, how each of us think, and how each of us perceive the world around us.

And this is why we all perceive art a little differently, and this is exactly the basis by which people assume and conclude that art has no rules.

But let me ask you a question… do you like sugar? If I handed you a lump of sugar to suck on, would you consider that a relatively pleasant experience? What if I asked you to gnaw on a brick of salt instead? Suck down a glass of vinegar? Gulp down a Slurpee of lemon rinds? Maybe chew on a gnarled stick?

For the most part, people so propositioned will have visceral reactions to the various suggestions I just made, because our brains are designed and wired to react to sense stimuli in a certain way. What’s more is that these reactions tend to be so baseline that they transcend the scope of particular individuals, localities, and even whole cultures. While there are variations in both execution and degree, every single human culture finds some pleasurable purpose in the use of sugar, or, putting a finer point on it, there’s a very good reason that Hershey chocolate is known throughout the world.

Sense of smell, touch, and hearing all exhibit these characteristics. Taylor Swift is ridiculously popular, even with people who desperately try not to get caught listening to her music. On the other end of the spectrum, even people who do not care for classical music will tend to tolerate Beethoven.

Sight is no different.

Now obviously, I’ve been leading you a bit down a primrose path and I’m trying to make a point, so let me just be upfront. I think most of what I struggle with in the art forms that I’m most concerned about are that they are less directly connected to our mind’s perceptions than some others. I can make me a damned tasty batch of cookies and pretty much everyone will love them and think they’re glorious. And yes, my wife’s cookies are way better that mine in a dozen imperceptible ways, but it’s largely hard to make a “bad cookie”. Don’t believe me? Go sample an entire aisle of cookies at the grocery store. Some of those are pretty “bad”, but I’d still eat a whole freaking box of them without batting an eye. Meanwhile, however, it is pretty easy to take a bad picture or write a terrible story. (aka Star Wars) And it is in these latter areas where I experience the most of the “you can’t tell me what’s art is” philosophy, and it is that which I am striving to address.

So, back to my point. (Sight is no different.)

Our brains are wired to respond to certain visual stimuli in a way that is common to humans. Want to see an excellent example? Play peek-a-boo with a baby and watch their reaction. Now do it with one thousand babies. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Oh hey, you’re back. How did you do? Yeah, pretty much as I expected.

And yes, that baby reaction is very much a sight thing. What you’re playing with is something called object constancy. Basically, the brain’s ability to maintain an understanding that something is there even though you can’t see it. Babies don’t have it. Adults do. Want to see the difference? Go play peek-a-boo with your coworkers. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

And yes, I suppose you could argue that it’s a brain thing, but if you’re going to make that argument I suggest you remove your brain and continue reading and let me know how well that works out for you. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

The important thing to draw from this is that we are, as Scott Adams puts it, “moist robots“. At our very foundation, our bodies and brains are built from a recurring blueprint that responds to certain stimuli in certain ways. When we’re cold, we seek warmth. When we’re hungry, we seek food. When someone at work plays peek-a-boo with us, we seek the men with the straight jackets. We humans have a core rule set that we work from that doesn’t vary based upon location or culture or experience, because it transcends all of those. Put a baby on Mars and it’ll respond to peek-a-boo the same way one does on earth. It’s as simple as that.

The trick is that as we grow and develop, we layer years upon years of personal experience onto our senses, and that affects our ultimate perception of the things we perceive from what we touch, taste, hear, and see. If you grow up in a country without cars, it may not occur to you that they are dangerous and you might well get killed while you stare one down in traffic, wondering what it is and why it is making that loud noise at you. But no matter where you grew up, you’re going to run in terror from a charging crocodile. And you’ll get eaten anyway. Those things are fast. But the reason for the reaction is because the crocodile is built into the bedrock of who humans are- or at least on a far lower tier than the Ford Fiesta- because those things are basically the last living dinosaurs. (the animal is the dinosaur… not the car… stay with me, people)

The rule of thirds is a lot like the crocodile, or, more accurately phrased, like a textbook description of the crocodile, documented with our best and most current understanding of crocodiles, such that someone could, in theory, build a reasonable representation of one from scratch, and then scare the willies out of the natives by chasing them around the village with it. Preferably while making scary crocodile noises. And here’s where I finally make this long-winded connection.

Are you ready?

-takes deep breath-

The various “rules” that you encounter in art are no, not actually rules. “Aha!” You say! No no. Wait. The “rules” are, however, the closest thing we have found that allows us to predict and shape human perception in a manner that gives us the reaction that we desired when we set out to create the art in the first place. They are essentially <em>theorems</em>, that we have discovered along our path in trying to understand “how people work”.

My favorite example of this is the movie, Casablanca. It is one of the most beloved movies of all time. At the time of its creation, its success was as much a shock to the people who created it as it was to the people who watched it. They figured they had something good, wanted to understand what it was they had done, and so they sat down and tried desperately to understand the underlying formula that they had accidentally mastered. The result was what we now know as The Hollywood Formula, and they started creating movies with that as the basis, and have been using it ever since. (There’s an amazing  Writing Excuses pod cast on this topic that is well worth a listen and will explain the formula.) Once you understand this formula, watching other popular movies becomes a fascinating exercise. Top Gun, another beloved movie, filmed decades later, is almost exactly the same structure as Casablanca. Weird, but true.

The rule of thirds, the golden mean, leading lines, compositional choices, color and exposure, and more… these are all examples of theorems like this… they represent our understanding and purposeful application of the knowledge of how we, as humans, react and respond to art. And many of these, such as the Golden Ratio, have been around and known since as far back as the ancient Greeks and possibly even the ancient Egyptians. These are the building blocks that we use to form and develop what we are trying to convey in art, upon which we unavoidably layer our own life experiences in a way that will also relate to our target audiences. But building our art upon a mismatched or absent understanding of those building blocks is akin to building a house atop a foundation of silly soap, or playing peek-a-boo with our coworkers, or trying to strike terror into the hearts of an isolated tribe of people by parking a Ford Fiesta in the village center.

Can you break or bend these rules? Of course. But you must first understand the <em>purpose</em> of the rules that you are trying to break, so that you can understand how breaking them affects the overall execution of the work. Simply stated, you can’t replace sugar with salt in a cake recipe simply because both are white granules. In so doing, you are demonstrating your lack of understanding of the purpose of the sugar, and therefore have made a choice to replace it that will break the overall perception of your cake, and give you an undesirable resultant reaction from any who might be so unfortunate as to eat it.

And this leads us back to our Boy Scout photography student, and any like him. He views art around him from a place of visceral interpretation without the understanding of how he has come to have that reaction. In the paraphrased words of Mary Robinette Kowall, he concludes that Harry Potter is a successful series of books because it is a story about a boy who lives under the stairs. And when he writes such a book, he is confused at the lack of success. He later grows up and chases coworkers around screaming peek-a-boo and throwing salt cakes at them out the window of his Ford Fiesta.

Don’t be this boy. Learn the rules- theorems, if you will. Understand them. Utilize them as you would any tool handed to you. In time, you will understand how they work, where they do not, and one day you will realize the if you bend the rule <em>just so</em> that you’ll have this interesting effect that you purposefully wanted to create in your viewer. And your viewer will react that way. And then you shall know mastery of your craft.