I saw this scene at the MoMA. People crowded around Van Gogh’s Starry Night. They ignored the painting beside it, Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy. Arguably, the second painting is just as famous as the first, but the public isn’t as familiar with it. So what is art?
Some of my professors would declare that the answer can only come from art itself and that talking about it is superfluous. But I’m going to be foolish enough to write something here.
We’re discussing the visual arts, especially drawing, painting, and sculpture. Even if a work is multimedia, it still has a predominantly visual component. It can extend into design, crafts, furniture-making, architecture, and landscaping.
Whether representational or abstract, art presents an image. All art defines space and composes in space using line, shape, volume, light, and shadow.
Art is aware of all that came before it in subject matter, composition, materials, and size. It knows its history. It is aware of culture as it’s context. Art can’t help but express political concerns, community, gender, and nationality. No matter what its subject, art will be influenced by its era, its culture, and the aesthetic concerns of its times.
Scale matters in art. What fits in the hand or is smaller than the average human body veers toward the intimate. What is the same size as a human body forces us to consider it with the same significance we might give to another person. What is larger than a human body becomes monumental and imposing. Some works can be so enormous that we can’t even see all of it at once. Our eyes have to move around in a way that the artist orchestrates through visual techniques. Large works therefore have a temporal component as well.
Art has mediums and genres. Those materials influence the work and can be part of the art (watercolor versus oil, marble versus bronze, pottery versus wood). While some artists may work outside of typical mediums, most will fall into one of the normal categories. Painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, still and moving photography, collage and assemblage, are predominant examples of mediums. Genres include the figure, landscapes (and seascapes), abstraction, politics, the philosophical, and social subjects (technology, industry, the digital world).
Art has direction. In most cases, it has an up and a down direction. That sense of uprightness orients us.
Art is a response to the human condition. Whatever its imagery might be it will incorporate the artist’s reactions. Even the attempts to remove the artist from the process, such as the incorporation of chance or the harvesting of online data, are still the result of artistic reaction and choices. The artist is embedded in the world, as we all are, and so they cannot escape reacting to it. When we say that art is personal expression, responding and depicting the human condition is inevitable.
Does it matter if an artist sells art? Does commerce indicate worthiness in art? Most artists try to sell their art, but what if one has to choose between the art one wants to make and the art that will be salable?
Anyone attending an art school with a modicum of talent and drive has the possibility to make salable art. But some artists have to make this decision: to embrace what they feel that they must do versus the lucrative. Sometimes, what is most meaningful to a person simply doesn’t sell. As a result, they have to decide whether their art matters more than direct income from their efforts.
Whether one works for the whole art world or for oneself, art matters. Imagery, along with language and numbers, is one of our fundamental ways to communicate. I have never been to anyone’s home that had nothing on the walls. Just suppose that there was no imagery in your daily life. You would sorely miss it. That shows the importance of art. The definition of success is variable and relative. If you find the art you want to make, or if you find the art you want to live with, then that’s the successful fulfillment of art.
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Vincent van Gogh. The Starry Night. Saint Rémy, June 1889. Oil on canvas. 29 x 36 1/4″ (73.7 x 92.1 cm). MoMA.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79802
Henri Rousseau. The Sleeping Gypsy. 1897. Oil on canvas. 51″ x 6′ 7″ (129.5 x 200.7 cm). MoMA.