“What the Art Means to Me”
How I believe art is best appreciated
When it comes to understanding art, it’s worth remembering that a work of art has always been made within some particular set of conditions. Art is made by people who live in situations peculiar to themselves, and their art is always a response to those situations in someway.
Perhaps the artist lived in a deeply religious community and was commissioned to make a fervently spiritual painting. Perhaps, on the other hand, the artist lived in an avidly secular environment, where socialising and drinking and visiting dance halls and nightspots were the pursuits that gave meaning to individuals’ lives
If we can begin to take an interest in those circumstances, then the art can come alive. Artists make their work within traditions and conventions, sometimes working with them and often against them. Always, some sort of imperfect negotiation of these forces is taking place. The artist wrestles with their circumstances.
Perhaps it is in forgetting this aspect of art that can sometimes make looking at art unnecessarily difficult.
Faced with objects we have trouble in reading, we tend to look for conventional hallmarks of quality as obvious signposts to meaning. If an old master artwork can be enjoyed then it tends to be for the technical skill of the artist. Meanwhile, more modern forms like abstract and conceptual art — lacking the same signs of technical acumen — can be all too easily disregarded as nonsense. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to argue in defence of some instance of modern art after somebody has told me their “child could make that.”
In my experience, what tends to be going on in conversations like this is that the person feels a lurking suspicion that the artwork is trying to fool them in some way. Questions like, “What is it for? What does it mean? What am I actually supposed to see?” disguise a deeper mistrust of the exalted status of art.
Galleries don’t always help in this regard. When we walk into the halls of a museum and see the rooms filled with artworks, it can sometimes feel like the art has indeed reached a plateau of perfection. Or at least, that’s the message it feels like we’re being given. Objects as hallowed as this, with security lasers and multi-million dollar price tags — not to mention the libraries of books written about them — give the impression of having been formed with all of the open-ended questions firmly answered.
But I think it’s important to remember that art is nothing like a science and that these artworks were not made in the cocoon of apparent perfection. They were made in crusty, cluttered, paint-spattered workshops by people who, just as often than not, were not famous or rich at the time, people who made their art in wobbly obedience to an obscure creative urge.
And this is how I believe we should approach art: alongside the artist, looking over their shoulder, hoping they will succeed (when in fact failure is an ever-present possibility. Many artists experience it all the time. I recently read about the British painter Francis Bacon, who after his death in 1992, left behind a studio with almost one hundred slashed or destroyed canvases that he viewed as failures.)
Then, when the artwork is made, when it is allowed to leave the studio and enter the outside world, the test of whether it does the task it was intended for takes place. If it is persuasive in this regard then it may have a chance of being well-received and possibly celebrated. If not, it will be forgotten.
As an audience, I think our best approach to art is to wonder about the forces that were at play during the making of the work: who was the artist, how was their life situated, and what struggles were they up against?
From the photos of Diane Arbus to the paintings of Édouard Manet, art encourages us to look beyond our immediate circumstances and to think about the world as a place where creativity wrestles with what’s permissible and what seems out of reach.
