“If my art has nothing to do with people's
pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?”
Ai Weiwei

What are the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" of the arts? 

When artists play "Rock, Paper, Scissors," what tools do they use?

Beauty?  Sorrow?  Subterfuge?

Denial?  Nonsense?

Truth?

What are the Rocks, Paper, and Scissors of the arts?

It depends on the nature of the tools.

Rocks provide blunt-force trauma, Paper is for smothering, and Scissors do the cutting.  The cutting tool can be smashed by trauma, and the blunt-force melee weapon can be suffocated by the paper.  The only way to defeat the stifling influence of the paper is to slice through it with the scissors.

So what is what?  What are the Rocks, Paper, and Scissors of the arts?

The rocks are life itself.  Life provides the trauma, the bricks that bludgeon the person who is using them to build a statue, or a wall, in a vain attempt to keep the pain out,

The sorrow and pain created by the trauma are the paper, upon which the subject may write a poem, or a suicide note, or a manifesto, or a shopping list...

Or perhaps make a painting, or a drawing,

A watercolor of a fire,

Like a lake of fire you can see.

Throw your blankets on the lake of fire while you can.

And scissors are the beauty, the reflection in the pond of the sunlight in the heavens.  The beauty cuts through the sorrow and the pain, and the light shining through that loathsome blanket will blind us if we're not careful.

Which we absolutely shouldn't be.

To defend ourselves against beauty is to throw stones at the sun, to smash the scissors of beauty

(And indeed our own skulls)

With rocks of postmodern ugliness and relativism.  Which condition invariably leads to drowning our trauma in pain and sorrow until we find another pair of scissors.

"How can this be a beautiful work of art
if it makes no attempt to transform
the raw material of an idea?"
Roger Scruton

If I ever become an art professor, I'm going to teach my students to reconcile the conceptual, reactionary rock & paper created by people drowning in trauma and political oppression like Ai Weiwei,

With the scissors of beauty championed by Roger Scruton.  I will teach my students to see the beauty of the rocks produced by Ai Weiwei, and how the free human spirit will create statues from trauma,

Beautiful statues,

And that sculpture is also an act of cutting, even if the only materials at hand are brutal and traumatic.  I will show my students that there is in fact no contradiction between Ai Weiwei's claim that if his art isn't about pain and sorrow it serves no purpose, and Roger Scruton's philosophy of beauty as the guiding principle of art, as eloquently (and beautifully) stated in his documentary Why Beauty Matters.  I will teach them this because our postmodern culture of blunt-force compliance pretends that Ai Weiwei's "attempts to transform the raw material of an idea" are entirely postmodern in nature.  Since his art is conceptual, and ostensibly divorced from the world of "traditional beauty," and the appreciation of this beauty Roger Scruton tries to instill in us,

Ai Weiwei may seem like just another smug "artistic" elitist whose "work," on the surface, may seem veiled in the fog of obscurantism.  And if he was from London or New York, it probably would be.

But once you realize that he's actually carving statues out of blunt-force trauma, that he is using the paper of pain and sorrow to smother those rocks, and that his family was exiled to a labor camp in western China under Mao Zedong, where they lived for 16 years,

It isn't hard to see that his smashing of the cultural vases of his homeland resembles the self-righteous, degenerate deconstructionism of hateful Western postmodernists in no way whatsoever.

There is a difference in creating artistic scissors by smothering rocks of trauma with pain and sorrow and the hateful, smug ingratitude it takes to duct-tape a banana to the wall.  If I were an art professor, or a car mechanic, I would teach my students and customers to appreciate Ai Weiwei in the same way I would teach them to appreciate Van Gogh.  I would remind them that his name is Ai Weiwei, not A.I. Weiwei, and that without freedom of speech there is no modern world, only a barbaric one.

“Without freedom of speech there is no
modern world, just a barbaric one.”
Ai Weiwei

I would tell them that to tolerate the distortion of history is the first step toward becoming the curator of a modern art museum in the West, puts the undiscerning social-engineering project well on the way toward establishing his- or herself as a spoiled, elitist enemy of art and beauty, and teaches them to tolerate humiliation in real life.

“Tolerating the distortion of history is the first step
toward tolerating humiliation in real life.”
Ai Weiwei

If I were an art professor, or a car mechanic, I would teach my students and customers that art is a high-stakes game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.  I would tell them it is better to at least attempt to make something beautiful out of a pile of traumatized rubble, and that to smother that rubble in sorrow and pain can be an act of artistic intent no less beautiful than painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,

"Through the pursuit of beauty, we shape the world as
a home, and in doing so, we both amplify our joys,
and find consolation for our sorrows."
Roger Scruton

But that to wallow in the rubble with a roll of duct tape and a piece of rotten fruit is to make no effort at all, and to align oneself with the forces of darkness throwing rocks at your head, and starting fires at your feet.

It is always preferable to paint a watercolor of a fire, than it is to start an actual fire,

If at all possible.