Art 

Art comes in many forms. The performing arts are music and theatre. The fine arts are painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic arts and photography. The applied arts are ceramics, weaving, design, jewelry, and woodworking. 

Art concerns itself with something called aesthetics and the aesthetic response. For most people, when they see a painting, the typical aesthetic response is that the painting is beautiful. The painting might be a landscape of the countryside, a portrait of a woman, or just colorful drips of paint. The aesthetic response does not depend upon the subject matter. If a person is receptive to the aesthetic response, a beautiful painting can be of a dirty toilet or it can be all black paint.

The aesthetic response can be other than the sensing of beauty. The artwork can also invoke the feeling of sorrow, happiness, joy, shock, quiet, noise, and almost any other sense or memory. To be receptive to the art, you almost need to turn off your brain’s mental processing, and allow just your sensory receptors to take in the art. In this way, you don’t try to see what a painting is of (mountains, people, objects) or how wonderfully they show the images. You just let your eyes see all the shapes and colors and subtleties in the painting. While you do this, the aesthetic response is the feeling you get from the artwork.

When you hear instrumental music, you don’t try to figure out what it’s about. You just listen. Certain music can give you the feeling of being somewhere you may never have been before. Instrumental music can make you feel like you are in a storm, or in a winter field, or in a quiet forest. When you see a painting, the same can be true, even though there are no representational images (objects you recognize). A painting can be primarily black and white, yet it can evoke the same sensation as a field of flowers.

To try to understand this better, I need to describe some of what I know about the brain. The neo cortex, the large outer part of the brain, has regions that have certain functions. There are parts that are involved in vision, hearing, the other senses, and for memory. Electrode and other instruments have shown what parts of the brain is active during specific activities. When you look at a sunset, first there is activity in the visual cortex, then in other parts of the brain. If you look at a painting of just reds, oranges and yellows, it might stimulate the same regions of the brain, thus evoking a “sunset” aesthetic response from that painting. But, if you look at the painting and try to figure it out, you will have different brain activity, and there will be no aesthetic sensation. 

In the same way, if I listen to a guitar player, I just sense sound and appreciate what I hear. When I try to see how he plays the music, I’m not listening as completely, so I loose some appreciation. But, I imagine that a really great pianist can appreciate the finger movements of others, on another level of the aesthetic response. It mainly depends on their sensitivity and how much someone is in tune to all aspects of the art.

This topic is being written to help people appreciate art, in all its forms, because art is one of the manmade items on my list of things that make life wonderful (see Things To Appreciate).