I have a recurring question that has insinuated itself throughout my whole life. It is a question which parents often shirk, which teachers often gloss over to protect their egos, and which peers and students alike answer with a shrug or an eye roll. The question I ask is "why?" I find consumers, producers, scientists and artists alike, always consumed by another question - "how?" How do I make money? How do I become famous? How does one achieve that signature look? How do I use the technology available to me in the 21st century? At base, we are asking how to use resources in order to benefit from them.
Both are valid questions, but my fear is that art, like many commodities viewed from a culturally American standpoint is judged by producers and consumers for only its presentation and not its content. I feel this when I show a peer a new work and they make suggestions or critiques for what might "look better." Instead I might ask "Why would that emphasize the concept, or the content of the piece?" Often the response is simply that it would "just look better," as if the idea or concept is secondary to the technique. Again my question is "why."
Aesthetics reveal our values, and even our morals. It concerns me as much when an artist shrugs in response to the question of why something is aesthetically valuable to them as it does when someone shrugs when you ask them why they lied to you, stole money, or hurt another human being. Aesthetics reveal our animal natures as well as our social values as humans. As artists, and all humans are artists, I believe that it is morally irresponsible to ever avoid the question, "why." While there may not be an answer readily available, like the artist who creates ugly mistakes in the confines of the studio, the process and the questioning are what make meaning, not the material product, or how it's used. More importantly, by asking "why" regarding our own tastes, and asking "why" regarding our values, we pick out double standards which can often cause us to re-evaluate not only our tastes, but our behaviors towards others. Art then becomes the abstract guidebook by which we form and reform our sense of justice.
I call myself a maker of things because this best defines every day of my life. I express myself in a variety of media because every world relies upon hundreds of mini-structures with which it defines its more obvious structure. Everything that is made is part of the process of making something else, and every action I take in a day is part of the process of my making. For this reason, I prefer to think of my products as processes. And while I may cling to media that gives the false impression of permanence, everything I do and am is dissolving into something or someone else, as I make.
Lexi Bass is a filmmaker and visual artist from Kentucky. She is the Digital Instructional Specialist in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches GRPH121 - Digital Literacy. Following a winding path through the southeast and midwest via visual arts, music, theatre and film, Lexi acquired her Masters in Art at the University of Louisville where she studied video and collaborated with graduate composers and musicians on her Master's Thesis Film, The Adytum. 
