Is art utter rubbish, a money grab, or an accurate emotional mirror? — On the interpretation of art.
Is Art Meaningless?
To analyse a painting is not something easy, nor straightforward. In fact, if someone asked me how to do it, they’d see me dumbfounded, and struggling to know what to say. Of course, this is also due to the fact that I am simply an art enthusiast. But, it might be also because sometimes reading a painting is nowhere near as scientific as reading statistical results, or the age of a bone. To illustrate what I am trying to convey, it may be useful to use two — both great in their own merit — very different paintings as case studies. Let’s say, we’d want to “analyse” Wassily Kandinsky’s Sketch 2 and Claude Monet’s Madame Monet and Her Son (1875), woman with a Parasol. What is the first thing we’d notice?
We are not going to really squeeze our brains reading and analysing the paintings in detail, but we can instinctively grasp an idea: it is easier to “see” the intention, and the subject, in Monet’s piece than in Kandinsky's. This has naturally no relation to value, or worth; it has mostly to do with human perception and recognition of known objects.
When I encountered the title “Is Art Meaningless” on YouTube, I thought that Abigail Thorn’s intentions were those of investigating if art had value, usefulness (hence the “utter rubbish” in the subtitle). I was, as it turns out, mistaken. More in line with the literal meaning of meaningless, the video was questioning if art had a — subjective or objective — meaning.
“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” — Francis Bacon
Mystery. Bacon’s quote may very well refer to an almost spiritual need of individuals to express their desire for all that is occult, or non-verbal and mysteriously emotional. Denis Donoghue argues in The Arts Without Mystery that contemporary society’s dedication to technology and logical explanation has a tendency to rob the arts of their “mystery.” Rendering them no much more than amusement…I think, I can see this in the transformation of some forms of art, which now are mostly used as décor or selfie backdrops. Though in all honesty, I feel that there is nothing wrong there either.
Also, some art was used to deepen mystery while unveiling it. Thinking here about Christian art and its role held before mass literacy.
Any-who and anyhow, Philosophy Tube…Before entering the virtual locus of a discussion room with Thorn, these are the main segments of her well researched (as they usually are, and, she even leaves a reference list in the description boxes. I’m a fan) video and argument:
The artist’s intention (read more about this here)
Feeling the right emotion
The art market (read more about this here)
Art and the audience
Thorn, as Madam X, posits that the aesthetic value of a painting might be subjective, but the meaning of a painting is not, or might be not, according to the idea that we might be wrong when interpreting a piece. To be fair, she extends the arguments to all works of art, like cinema, for instance. Therefore, we can now see (with the inclusion of more verbal/immediate forms of art) how one might be wrong: you can definitely misinterpret Shakespeare, and almost surely misinterpret David Lynch. But can the same be said for painting and sculpture? Is it fair to set them in the same category when discussing meaning? Even further, are we sure that the idea of objective meaning stands for paintings such as the work of Leonardo (or the fat cow above) as much as for the work of Klee, or Rothko?
Much like Madame X, to explore further points of discussion, we will have to assume that at the very least there might be an objective meaning to all works of art.
The Death of The Artist…Or are they still alive?
The vexata questio: do meanings reside with the author’s intentions?
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else… Nobody really sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time… So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it.” — Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe was a modernist American artist who was known for her studies on natural subjects, including flowers and skulls, as well as her images of New York City towers and landscape and building elements distinctive to northern New Mexico. As copied above, she did leave a statement about the reason (and meaning?) for her flower works; paining what she saw, giving size to small, beautiful things. Should we then accept this as the true and only meaning of her pieces?
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