Human beings have engaged in art since the earliest dawn of human awareness. The earliest humans drew paintings on cave wall to depict their life cycles, different facets of their lives, their first primitive attempts to understand spiritual realities, and to express and grapple with their existence.
People have been struggling ever since to understand what art is, what makes something art, and why it’s such an integral part of human psychology.
People have offered many hypotheticals to ask questions about where art begins and ends before it stops being art and becomes a completely different facet of human experience.
This is the question modern art asks. If someone takes a can of red paint and pours it on the canvas, what makes that art or not art compared with a Rembrandt painting?
What about cars? Most of us consider cars purely utilitarian. Their function is to transport us from one place to another—and yet people have constructed entire museums full of cars and displayed them to illustrate the beauty, artistry, and elegance of these vehicles. So where do we draw the line?
One example that came up in a recent online discussion on the subject highlighted a musical performance in which the composure wrote nothing but rests on the score sheet. The orchestra entered the auditorium. The musicians took their seats. The conductor counted them in and then the musicians just sat there in silence doing nothing for the entirety of the performance. Is that art?
What about if someone accidentally drops a camera on the ground and it snaps a random picture of whatever the lens happens to be pointing at right at that moment? Is that art?
A beautiful landscape in nature that moves us emotionally—is that art? How much does the artist’s intentionality determine whether or not something is art? What’s the difference between a beautiful landscape and a cultivated garden or a bonsai tree that has been deliberately cultivated to look a certain way?
What is the difference between a modern Prius driving down the street, a vehicle that has been deliberately built to be purely utilitarian, and to a Lincoln Continental car that was created sixty years ago for the purpose of being purely utilitarian? At what point in history does a car cease to be a utilitarian tool and become art?
What’s the difference between a modern painter who splatters paint on the canvas to express his rage, depression, and rebellion against society and the same artist splattering paint on a canvas because he’s bored and doesn’t know what to paint? Is one of them art and one of them not?
Detractors of modern art will point to the fact that it takes much less time, effort, and training to create modern art than it takes to create, say, the Sistine Chapel. Does the time, effort, and craft expertise the creator invests in the work determine the value of the finished product or even whether we should consider a work “art” or not?
How much should we consider a work’s value based on how easily the audience grasped the author’s original intent? Does the work become less valuable if the viewer or end user needed to have the creator’s intent explained to them?
Some would argue that they didn’t understand the value of modern art until they learned the context, both critically and historically. Others point out that the work is less valuable, not more so, if the audience needs to have it explained to them.
These people would argue that we should judge the work based on what is actually presented. If the work itself doesn’t convey the meaning, then the creator failed to communicate their message and the work fails as a piece of art on that basis.
On the other hand, the audience might come to their own conclusion about what message the work conveys based on their own experience, interpretation, and ideas. The audience’s interpretation might have nothing to do with whatever the creator was thinking and planning when they created the work.
How valid are the audience’s interpretations if they’re exactly opposite or radically different from what the creator had in mind? How valuable is it if the audience comes to one conclusion on their own and then changes their mind completely about what the work means once they find out what the creator had in mind?
Human beings have been asking these questions about art and the artistic process since the dawn of time.
The one thing we can all agree on is that art is a uniquely human endeavor. Art is our way of interacting with, understanding, and processing our experience of reality. Humans are the only species on the planet that engages in art. It’s one of the things that separates us from other animals and makes us what we are.
We’re also the only species that asks questions about what art means. A chimpanzee might take pictures of its environment with a camera. The chimpanzee doesn’t ask questions about what these pictures mean.
The pictures come to mean something when humans ask the questions and display the pictures so others can ask the questions, too.
We can extend this line of thinking to the natural world. The natural world is extremely beautiful. We might draw a lot of meaning from the natural world. It might evoke strong emotions in us and raise questions about the nature of our existence, but nature on its own is not art. No one created mountains, landscapes, and the expanses of space for the purpose of expressing something about reality.
Religious people might claim that God created all of these things for us—or for some other reason. Some might claim that God created these things for the express purpose of evoking strong emotions in us and getting us to ask these questions about the nature of our existence.
We can probably all agree that God didn’t create these things to communicate a particular artistic message about the nature of reality and existence. It would be more accurate to say that these things ARE reality and existence.
People sometimes say that all of creation is God’s work of art, but this essentially makes my point for me. A mountain is not a work of art—not until someone takes a photograph or paints a picture of the mountain and presents it to an audience of human beings for the purpose of expressing some artistic message.
No one looks up at the Milky Way and thinks of it as a work of art. The night sky is just there in all its glory. What we think and feel when we see it is not the same as engaging with a piece of art that was created by a human being for the purpose of expressing themselves or making a comment on the nature of human life.
I one hundred percent support the concept of “death of the author”. This concept in art interpretation takes two possible forms. In the first form, those who reinterpret the work as their own have every right to have their own creation judged on its own merit independently from the original work that inspired it.
For example, if a creator adapts a novel to film or TV and makes changes to the original source material, then the finished film or TV show has a right to be judged as an entirely new creation without reference to the source material. The finished film or TV show stands and falls based on its own merits regardless of how well it adapted the original source material.
The second version of death of the author means that the audience is free to interpret the work entirely separately from whatever the author had in mind when they created the work. I might have a certain idea in my mind about what a novel means when I write it. I might go to great lengths to communicate this message through the plot, characters, worlds, and themes of my work.
Once the story leaves my hands, each person who reads it is entitled to come up with their own interpretation of what the work means. Their own experience, feeling, and beliefs will inform this interpretation and their interpretation is entirely valid. It’s valid because that is the message that they ultimately took away from my work regardless of whether I intended to communicate something entirely different.
When I tell my audience what I was thinking and planning when I created the work—when I tell them what message I intended to communicate—my interpretation of the work is just that. It’s my interpretation and that is just one possible interpretation out of thousands or millions.
Each person will interpret a work of art differently and that’s exactly the way it should be. In the end, I’m just one person with my own individual interpretation of the story. My interpretation of the story is unique to me based on my own experience and beliefs. My interpretation is no more valid than anyone else’s just because I happen to be the person who wrote the book.
It isn’t my place to tell people they’re wrong just because their interpretation differs from mine. In a way, the story exists as an entity apart from me. Stories come from a vast collective consciousness in which all our stories and all possible stories exist in a dimension of pure spiritual and conceptual otherness.
As the creator, I access these stories through my imagination and I bring them to life. Once I finish creating it, the story continues to exist apart from me in this conceptual dimension.
I become another member of the audience. I interact with the story and take my own meaning from it the same way everyone else does. The story stands on its own as something detached and independent from me.
Any member of the audience can interpret the work in their own way. It shouldn’t be necessary for them to look into why I created it, where the idea came from, or what I was thinking before they can understand the work. Each member of the audience will understand it in their own way and all these interpretations are equally true and valid.
I witnessed a striking example of this when the film biopic of Malcolm X came out in movie theaters. This film starred Denzel Washington as Malcolm and it caused a big stir in the entertainment industry and with audiences.
A young man I knew went to see this movie. This young man had become a hardcore drug addict at the age of eleven, overdosed at sixteen, went through a long and painful recovery, and has been deeply involved in the Twelve Step recovery programs ever since.
He came out of the film with a powerful feeling of connection to Malcolm’s story of drug rehabilitation through his discovery of Islam. This was the part of the movie that resonated with this young man. The race relations aspects of the film meant next to nothing to him.
Art is a form of communication between the creator and the audience. Human endeavor doesn’t become art until someone displays it to the audience as art.
A car driving down the street being used as a purely utilitarian transport tool is not a piece of art. It becomes a piece of art when someone puts it on display specifically as a way of communicating something to the audience.
A car displayed in the salesroom window isn’t there as a piece of art. It’s there as a marketing strategy. A car displayed at an industry convention in the annual roll-out of new models isn’t intended as a piece of art.
The car doesn’t become art until someone puts it into a museum or an art gallery and, points to it, and says to the viewing audience, “Isn’t this such a beautiful piece of art?”
The designers in their drafting room were not trying to create a piece of art that would be displayed to the public to make a statement about their place in history or the culture in which they were living at the time. They were trying to create a tool that would perform as efficiently, economically, safely, and as functionally as possible.
The car doesn’t become art until someone presents it to an audience as art. The car doesn’t become art until someone presents it as a communication device to make a statement about human life, culture, history, and experience.
Cars from the 1950s and 1960s tell a story. Their size, beauty, and styling tell us about the thought process of people living in that time. The cars tell us that these people were living in a simpler, more decadent, more stylized, more aesthetically idealized world than we are living in right now. That is the message the presenters want us to take away from the work.
The same is true of a landscape portrait. The landscape as it exists in nature isn’t a work of art—not in the way human beings create art to communicate their experience to each other. The landscape doesn’t become art until someone paints or photographs a picture of it and then presents it to the audience for evaluation.
Then the question becomes a matter of interpreting the artist’s methods and intent. What’s the difference between a landscape painted by Rembrandt, a landscape photographed by Ansel Adams, and a landscape painted by Georgia O’Keefe?
The difference is how the artist’s methods and finished work cause us as the audience to form different interpretations of what the different artists were trying to communicate. What message do we walk away from based on how they presented the work? What was the artist trying to tell us about life, the world, and human experience through the work?
We don’t ask these questions when we see a landscape in nature. These questions are completely irrelevant when we see a landscape in nature because there is no artist’s intent behind the landscape as it exists in nature. There is no message being communicated—not a message about life, the world, and human experience.
Similarly, the person who accidentally drops their camera on the floor and snaps a picture of the floor tiles isn’t creating a work of art. The picture only becomes art when the person presents it to the audience and asks the audience to interpret something from it.
Anne Frank had no plans for anyone to read her private diary. She wasn’t thinking when she wrote it that anyone would ever read it. She wrote it only for herself to get her thoughts out on paper. The diary of Anne Frank didn’t become a work of art until people publishing it after her death with the express intention of telling the audience something about the environment in which she wrote the work. The work is intended to tell us something very specific about human nature and the realities in which we all live.
The same goes for the chimpanzee who learns to use a camera. The chimpanzee isn’t creating art in the same way a human being would. The chimpanzee isn’t taking pictures to express its life experience nor is the chimpanzee trying to communicate anything with its audience.
The chimpanzee isn’t thinking about anything. The human being who comes along, develops the pictures, and presents them to the audience is the one who is asking the audience to derive some meaning from the images. This is when the pictures become art.
What meaning the audience finds in the finished work or if the audience finds any meaning in them at all is a completely different question. Many people have entered art galleries, wandered around for a little while, and left having been moved by nothing they’ve seen in the whole building.
Now we’ve defined what art is. Let’s apply this definition to modern art and decide how it works and what gives modern art its place in the vast pantheon of human endeavor.
Modern art interacts with the audience. A painter who splatters paint randomly on a canvas might have been bored and out of ideas that day. He might not have been thinking or feeling anything when he created the work. The audience might feel nothing when they see this work.
The canvas in question becomes art when the artist hangs the painting on an art gallery wall and asks the audience to judge and interpret the meaning behind the work. The work becomes art when the artist asks the audience to place the painting on the same live with a picture by Rembrandt, Adams, or O’Keefe.
A random pedestrian who happens to pass the gallery window right then might not take anything from such a painting. The passerby might not even consider that this painting qualifies as art.
There is one segment of the audience who will definitely consider the painting as valuable and important as a painting by Rembrandt. These people are the critics themselves. The artist is trying to communicate something to them. The artist is trying to communicate his or her place in the pantheon of human endeavor by making a statement about how art is created, the craft expertise that goes into it, and what this random collection of splatters tells us about our world, our history, our culture, and our mindset as we are living it right now. That is the value of modern art.
The craft expertise that goes into the work—the time, effort, training, and mastery a particular work took to create—these are all part of the finished creation the artist presents to the audience for evaluation. Rembrandt, Adams, and O’Keefe all used radically different methods, came from radically different experiential backgrounds, and used vastly different technologies to create the desired result.
These methods tell us incredible amounts about the worlds and histories these artists lived in, their individual life experiences, the cultures that influenced their work, and the mindsets they brought to their craft that translated into the impression they leave with their audiences.
Modern art is a valid form of art. It deserves to be treated as an art form with an equally valuable place in the annals of human history and artistic interpretation alongside Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Beethoven, and many others.
Any individual person has a right to decide if modern art speaks to them. Every individual is entirely within their rights to say a piece of modern art is ugly, stupid, meaningless, and a waste of space.
Not everyone thinks a 1963 Chevy Sting Ray is a work of art. Some people will just see it as a car like any other. They’ll judge it based on its efficiency in transporting people from one place to another. They’ll decide based on its limited interior compartment space and less-than-efficient fuel economy that the Sting Ray isn’t a very good car at all.
These people are entirely within their rights to judge the car—or any other piece of art—based on their own criteria.
If you ask the people who like modern art if it’s beautiful, meaningful, iconic, and culturally significant, these people will undoubtedly say yes. Their interpretation is also entirely valid. We shouldn’t dismiss their interpretation because it’s true for them.
If they find meaning in the work, then the work must have some meaning for them to take away. If the work defined a cultural moment to this target audience, then the work did in fact define a cultural moment to a certain segment of the population. We can’t deny that simple fact.
Many people think comic books are stupid, childish, and immature as an art form—and yet millions or even billions of people love comic books. People all over the world invest vast sums of money in them and can talk for hours a day about nothing else. These people have supported the comic book industry for a hundred years.
Comic books have created a cultural, historical, and artistic footprint on human experience. You might not like it. Any individual person might think it’s stupid and a waste of time and money. You still can’t deny that it does have a place in the pantheon of human culture and experience.
Art is so unique and important to us as human beings. We’ve been creating art for thousands of years and we still don’t even understand what it is or why we need to do it.
Some people argue that art is something ubiquitous that every single human being who lives and dies on this planet rather than being confined to a simple few who feel driven to create art.
These people argue that everyone feels compelled to create art in one way or another. The human soul feels a fundamental drive to express itself, to understand and interpret its own experience, to assign some meaning to it, and to communicate this meaning to the rest of the world even if only in a small way.
One of the things that makes art so great is this deep need within ourselves not only to create it but to understand what art is and why we do it. We can talk about it for hours and even days. We can bounce different interpretations off each other, disagree about what a particular work means, present different aspects of the work that support our arguments, and change our opinion based on how compelling another person’s position is.
Art is one of the greatest vehicles at our disposal for human interaction. None of us will ever fully understand why we have art or why we need it so badly. A religiously minded person might suggest that, if God hadn’t given us the ability to create art, we would have had to invent it for the massive benefits it brings us as a society and a species.
If you don’t believe me that art is critical to human life, consider this fact. Art thrives in the worst economic conditions. Art thrived during the Great Depression. Art thrived during the Dark Ages. Art has survived the fall of empires and every other major upheaval the human race has ever known.
Art is not frivolous. Art isn’t something we do in our free time when we have nothing better to do. Art isn’t something we engage in when we have some extra money lying around and we want to splurge.
Art becomes even more important and necessary during times of hardship and uncertainty. Art becomes critical for us to interpret and understand what’s happening to us.
Art becomes more important not just to the people making it but to the people who consume it. People read more books, played more music, and went to the theaters more often during the Great Depression than they did during the decadent heyday years of the 1920s and 1930s. People needed art to get them through the hard times.
We all need food, water, air, and shelter to survive—but then what? What does life mean without something to create and work toward? What is life worth if we can’t create some meaning and beauty out of the world around us? What is life worth if we can’t communicate our thoughts to others and enjoy the beauty of sharing our art with others?
What’s the point of going through all of this if what we’ve learned, experienced, and interpreted about human life just disappears when we die? What’s the point if we don’t transmit that hard-won knowledge to those who come after us?
Art isn’t just a bunch of pretty pictures on the wall. It’s the very thing that makes life mean something. It’s an essential, important, and beneficial part of our lives, both as creators and as the consumers of other people’s art.
Art imparts massive benefits to human life. It’s one of those rare joys that brings nothing but upside. Art doesn’t hurt people or rob anyone of anything. What people do with the art they consume is an entirely separate argument that has nothing to do with the original creator or the work itself. As I said before, how a person interprets the work is up to them.
We are all extremely lucky that art is such an integral part of human life. We have all benefited from works of art throughout our lives. There is not one person alive on the planet right now who has not been formed by some impactful work of art somewhere along the way.
These works were all created by someone. Think about that. This simple fact should give you hope. It should make you realize just how important you are. You might think you aren’t artistic and can’t do anything to make the world a better place. You would be wrong on both counts.
Everyone who has ever had an impact on your life through their art once started out not knowing anything. Everyone had to start somewhere. Everyone started out fumbling with their art and making trash instead of something beautiful and meaningful. The same thing would happen if you started right now.
You would keep working at it the same way they did until you got better. Eventually, you would make something as beautiful, meaningful, and as culturally impactful as the works you consider so great and important.
Each and every one of us has that capacity within us. Each of us can change other people’s lives through our art and effort. Each of us can help others, change their lives, and direct the course of human history toward something so much more beneficial and productive.
Each of us has the capacity to spread peace, understanding, and human connection. This capacity spreads from those closest to us to people on the other side of the world whom we will never see, speak to, or even find out about.
This has massive implications for all of us. We’re leaving so much on the table if we don’t seize this opportunity and make the most of it in the short time we’ll spend on this planet. We all have this capacity.
If we don’t take it, then we have no business complaining about the hardships, cruelties, and barbarity of human life because we are the ones who are making it that way. We’re making it that way by omission—by failing to make the great and beautiful things that are in our hands to make—the works of art that could actually make a difference. Those great and beautiful things are only in our hands—no one else’s.
I hope this helped someone. May God bless all of you with health, prosperity, and happiness.
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