Gurdjieff’s response to these questions draws a resolute distinction between what most people accept as art and the criteria which he demands that it fulfill. His claim is that most people, rather than measuring art by the consciousness which it represents, measure it instead by its unconsciousness. People are in the habit of admiring the elusive or indefinite or mysterious quality which they take for granted as an essential component of an act of artistic creation, without which, they assume, we are dealing with craft, perhaps, or some other type of product which is inferior to art. In contrast, Gurdjieff measures artistic merit solely by the level of consciousness an artwork represents. Again he explains: “You say—an artist creates; I say this only in relation to objective art. In relation to subjective art I say that with him ‘it is created.’ You do not differentiate between these, but this is where the whole difference lies.”3 Subjective art involves no creative act on the agent’s part; instead, something “is created” in or through the agent who serves as a vehicle for “creative” activity: “This means that he is in the power of ideas, thoughts and moods which he himself does not understand and over which he has no control. They rule him and they express themselves in one form or another.”4 When these moods have taken some accidental form, they just as accidentally produce an affect on the art appreciator, depending again on personal moods, tastes, habits. In the making of subjective art everything about the creative process and its effect on the perceiver is accidental, whereas with objective art the artist is the sole responsible agent of creation: “He puts into the work whatever ideas and feelings he wants to transmit. And the action of this work upon men is definite”5 Each person responds to authentic art according to his or her level of understanding, but nothing is arbitrary about its creation or transmission. The true artist determines and controls the process of creation from start to finish, including thoughts, feelings, the projection of energies, all of which are generated from within.
