More than meets the eye

I haven’t been to any museum in my life, and yet I find that I have a particular liking for art. Not just of the kind we find in museums, but the kind that we see around us every day. Why I haven’t been in an art museum is for two reasons – the first and obvious is that there no museums around me, but also there’s the fact that I don’t really have as much of an appreciation for that type of art because they’re mostly historic or some sort of inferential rather than direct. In my experience, there are two types of art lovers.

Those who appreciate what they see

I think that this is the category I personally fall in, and the category that houses most people. For people like me, I judge art first with my eyes. I need to like what I see (or hear) to consider it a work of art. I added hear because I consider products of sound (music or instruments or the likes) to be works of art too.

I posted “Art is really just a means to launder money fr” on my WhatsApp Status last week, and had some very interesting conversations with people. When I posted that, my interpretation of art was limited to the if it doesn’t look beautiful to me, surely it can’t be worth a 100mil. But then I realized that the type of people who buy art for lots of zeros fall into the second category I’ll be talking about.

People who are more inclined towards what what they see represents.

To some people, art is about style, creativity, storytelling, etc. To those people, art does not just represent a beautiful painting, or a nice song. People in this category are interested in what the supposed artwork represents. The Mona Lisa obviously is not the most beautiful painting in the world, but it’s one of the most expensive. Priceless even, if you ask some people. Why do you think that is? Because it was painted by a white man? Because it is very old? Because the paint was extracted from the oil of seeds of some sacred tree? Perhaps, it’s because Da Vinci is so cool?

Have you heard Kanye’s Runaway? If you haven’t maybe you should check it out. I can’t guarantee you’ll like it, but it’ll help you put what I’m about to say into perspective. He sings the ending of the song in a sort of a mumbled voice. When many people including myself initially hear this part of the song, you’ll simply think it’s a melody he added in there. But there’s more. There’s a lyric distorted in the mumble, and he did that to basically say that even if people could hear him, they wouldn’t understand the pain he’s going through. That right there, is a piece of art for me - the creativity.

Good thing is, we don’t have to force the philosophy of art to conform to the perception of either of these 2 groups of people. We can just leave it and let everyone define their version of art subjectively, whether it’s simply a beautiful painting that does not carry any deeper meaning, or it’s a picture of the sky with the stars arranged in some constellation that encodes a message only decipherable by a certain group of people.

All images are mine

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