What is art?

I have been pondering about this question in Denver somehow.  Wandering around the art festival at Denver, I saw a big photo of a wall on an empty street, maybe in Mexico.  On the wall, a man with a long beard is looking at you with an unreadable smile.  It is just graffiti.  But because of the especially wide angle of the photo and the cleanliness of the composition, it becomes an interesting photo.   I cannot help imaging how the photographer noticed the scene and tried to capture it at the right moment.  Maybe he had to wait till the street was clear of passers.  Will I have the patience? I doubt it.  Another photo is taken in a quiet and narrow street paved with stones. It was at night and just rained.  A street lamp was standing on the wall with a glowing light.  A few steps away, a puddle was laying on the ground. On its mirror-like surface was the reflection of the light and the lamp.  It is a peaceful picture with a subtle beauty.  I suppose we all somehow have passed a puddle next to a light.  Only those who have an eye looking for the beauty of life will see the delicacy in this ordinary scene.  So live artists.  Their eyes work as an extra pair of glasses that help me to see the world more clearly and more engagingly.

Believe it or not, life works in a mysterious way.  What is art?  I found the exact same question was asked at the corner at the Denver Art Museum and many more answers were given.  "Art is a lie which makes us see the truth" - an answer from Pablo Picasso.  Is it so?  There is this big piece of modified photo hanging on the leaning wall in the Museum.  I had to bend my neck backward and look up to see it.  On the picture, a naked lady wearing an oxygen mask is standing in front of a white cross.  At the corners of the cross, it reads "forget heroes, forget morality, forget shame, forget innocence".  Two big red banners stamped across the body and made the statement: IT IS OUR PLEASURE TO DISGUST YOU.  Why?  Is it truly their pleasure?  Who are we that define "our"?  Through the layer of questions and masks, I could not help wondering whether our sense is too dulled by the suffocating "reality". Are we too used and succumbed to the lack of glorious human ideals so the artist felt necessary to take exaggerating efforts to recover our sense of being, no matter how rebellious, ridiculous or even disturbing the efforts might be?  Often a time, with such a bombing visual reminder, artwork just makes me stop thinking and start to see.  I feel my breath and heartbeat, again.  Oh, that feels good and that feels right.  I guess Picasso has a point.

“Art is the appearance of the idea”.  This is Hegel-Schiller’s answer.  I cannot agree more.  There is one chapter in the book Einstein – His Life and Universe talking about how Einstein’s general theory of relativity inspired a great momentum of art reform sweeping over Western civilization.  As it said “…modernism was born by the breaking of the old strictures and verities…”  The change of human outlook of how space and time become changeable and interchangeable must have thrilled these artists who never stopped questioning the justification of the existing rules.  In 1907, one year after Einstein’s special theory of relativity was born, Picasso finished The Young Ladies of Avignon.  It is a signal of the start of Picasso’s cubism approach through which he deciphered his objects by understanding what they are instead of what they appeared to be.  The multiple dimensions that have been brought to the painting, so vividly different from the European old school paintings, intuitively suggested some interactions with the new understanding of physics.   If Einstein’s theory is a big jump from Newton’s in terms of explaining how the world operates, Picasso probably did the same thing using his brushes. 

An example I found in the Denver Art Museum is the Quantum Cloud XXXIII by Antony Gormley.  It is a steel statue that is composed of numerous straight and slender steel pieces in a random pattern.  The surroundings and the body are all connected but in different levels of condensation.  The artist said: “One cannot be certain whether the body is a condensation of energy or the energy is an emanation of the body”.  Excuse me for connecting all the dots with the book of Einstein – the statue just reminded me of the quantum theory and the comprehension of photons as the smallest ingredients of universe that compose everything.  It is about unity and randomness.  I definitely get Gormley’s idea behind his work, distantly if not completely. 

I am sure there are many more good answers to the question.  A few quotes from the answer board at the Museum:

Art = a mad search for individualism – Paul Gaugin

Art never expresses anything but itself – Oscar Wilde

Art is not “about”. Art is. – Walter Darby Bannard

If it has a use, it is not an art – not sure who said so

…

The list can go on.

The last thought I want to add here is that art is a very personal experience.  If I do not have such experience, emotion, knowledge, understanding, observation, or compassion of the subject in my life, it is hard to establish the sympathy toward the art.  For instance, I was very touched by a piece of statue called One Month Late in the Museum.  The piece is made of wax and red lipstick which arouses a very feminine touch.  Surrounded by a group of red ties, a pair of red shoes stood in the middle.  Above the shoes is a bent wire coat hanger symbolizing self-induced abortion.  Forget about the exaggeration and symbolization that is necessary to emphasize the point.  As a female that works in a male-thinking dominated environment and is aware of the difference of my natural tendency and male tendency in acting, I probably embraced this art piece much more easily than an average man. Things like this beyond explanation can shape one’s perception of art very differently.

So, do I have an answer?  I guess so.  But I will still keep looking.

P.S.  A few art pieces from the Denver Art Museum and by Picasso mentioned are listed above in the following order:

It is our pleasure to disgust you unknown

The Young Ladies of Avignon by Pablo Picasso

Quantum Cloud XXXIII by Antony Gormley

One Month Late by Rachel Lachowicz