Will it make better what cannot be improved? I sometimes wonder how people can use (and abuse) art as a standard of good taste (don’t confuse this with the works of Hume!). How can the propagation of one’s imagination become the level to which our lives should be compared? Does it makes us better? What about the book Goebbles wrote? What about the art-collection of Stalin & Hitler? They knew their Classics, so why are even modern philosophers convinced of the goodness of art?
As long as art is conceived from a correct point of view, the propagation of someone’s imagination, I’m willing to follow this way of thinking, but that is just a very narrow perspective, a very small part of the population is able to recognize fact from fiction, imagination from reality, specially when it comes to art. Art is never intended to make us better people, it’s most of all because person X asked person Y to glorify himself (sometimes herself). The lawless art of the twentieth century showed us the other extreme, but that’s a different case.
Art as the ultimate power to improve our lives, am I ready to live up to this ideal, because my studies require me to? I want to say yes, but I can’t. I just refuse to see art as the answer to every ethical question asked. An artist is nothing more than on person, an individual, who holds no more truth than you or I. So how can he or she be responsible for me improving what I already hold for granted? My life is just as I see fit, do we need the opinion of strangers to tell us otherwise?
My philosophy (I consider myself to be someone inspired by Taoism) tells me that there are several ways in life that can help us trying to rationalize. But they are not binding, they leave room for open interpretation. And I feel the same way about art. Of course, one should be free to enjoy whatever he/she likes and be able to reject the opposites, but that makes art in no way the answer to every question. Does the Venus of Milo tell me how my girlfriend should look like? Or what to search for in a woman? This would be a rather idiotic line of thought, for it leaves me no way of free interpretation.
I think that art should be considered as what it was intended for: combine the context with what is on hand, what has been created and try to understand the reason why. One cannot fully understand the correct context, that’s no more than normal, but try to be creative, to become inspired by everything surrounding the work of art. Don’t look at the Mona Lisa as the best work of art Leonardo might have created. That’s just administered by journalists and a (now) famous writer, but who are they to tell us what we can or can’t consider beautiful or ugly? Instead, look at the Mona Lisa as a painting of a woman, nothing more and try to ask yourself if you like it or not, without knowing the background situation. Yes, I can tell you that the Mona Lisa has been Leonardo’s muse, that her smile was already present at an earlier painting, that the difference between the left and right background has several reasons, but they are of no importance for how I or you should perceive the painting as painting. The picture drawn is that of a woman, not of some wondrous person existing outside of our world. She doesn’t. She actually has existed and was no more normal than you or me.
But as long as people need other’s opinions to satisfy their own, it’s impossible to fully understand art in it’s correct context. So I’m not trying to fight it any longer. I will just look at art from my perspective and try to respect yours. After all, who am I to make you or anybody else to share my point of view? In which way would that differ from all those I consider to force their will upon others?
