WHAT IS ART?

WHAT IS ART?

With the death of Thomas Kinkade, the American painter, I read that many people do not consider his painting as art and many (by far more than the others) do like it very much and say he was a great artist. So what is art? I do not think that the dictionary can give us a good definition but let’s start there:

Art: “The power of performing certain actions especially as acquired by experience, study or observation; skill, dexterity. Application of skill and taste to production according to aesthetic principles; the conscious use of skill, taste and creative imagination in the practical definition or production of beauty.”

But in the Merriam Webster dictionary there is a full page of definitions for art, therefore there is an art in defining art. No wonder ordinary people like me cannot know for sure what art is.

I need here another definition in order to continue with my discussion: snob: “One rightly or especially wrongly convinced of his superior knowledge of taste within a field or the intrinsic superiority of his field of interest or hobby.”  I needed this definition of snob, because this kind of people is always associated with art. This means that many snob people are always there to tell you that their art is art while any other “art” cannot be considered as such. Sometimes maybe you encountered some people who really have a great knowledge of art mingled with snob people and you cannot separate one from the other. According with the definition of snob you should be able to distinguish one from the other, because a snob is just a follower of the fashion while the art expert who is really knowledgeable follows nothing but the art itself. But there are many snobbish ones so sophisticated that for the ordinary people are simply impossible to separate from the good ones when you see them only once or twice.

At the end it does not matter, and you not even need to know what art is, but simply enjoy what you like or not enjoy it if you don’t like it. If a painting makes you feel good and you want to stay there admiring it, that’s all what counts, at least for me.

Unfortunately for the ordinary people like me, there are many places in the art world, that you go and visit and bring to your soul not very good feelings and if you say so, you are branded as ignorant, stupid or something else, that maybe be a correct epithet, and again it doesn’t matter and that’s the reason I am going to describe some of those art places.

I lived in Barcelona for six years, and because of that I was exposed to the Catalonian art, and the Catalonian snob and knowledgeable art people as well as to the nationalistic sentiment of Catalunya with Dalí, Gaudí, Miró and others.

Barcelona is full of Gaudi architecture with the Sacred Family Church and La Pedrera as some of his art to be admired. At the same time you are shocked to see the “art’ of an individual named Tapies who with a building with its roof “adorned” with barbed wire made me feel as I said before an ignorant in ‘art”. This same Tapies had in the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art in Madrid a “work of art” made of a frame full of hay maintained in place by two cinches (girths); its name: HAY. This Museum with the George Pompidou Center in Paris made me think of the “art” as a subject not suitable for people with usable brains. If not just an example, once in the Pompidou Center, I observed a group of people following a “guide” who was “explaining” to them another “work of art” consisting in a canvas painted completely in black; for 20 minutes I was there listening and when the “guide” finished, turn around to another one painted completely in white and took another half an hour to “explain” them this other “art”.

Back in Barcelona and Catalonia I went to another of this kind of museums, the Miró Museum where I “admired” hundreds of “works of art” from him and other modern “art creators” like the one named “Hands in the space” (Manos en el espacio) that the first thing I thought when I saw it, was that the guy next door (who painted my house) spilled yellow paint on the floor, put his hand on it and then several times on a black canvas, and that was the “work of art”. Miró was so creative than in a Barcelona newspaper (La Vanguardia) came an article about him using a mop full of paint and rubbing it on a window in the process of “creating another work of art”.  Let me tell you the words of another art “critic”. Once in 1992 we were in the World Fair in Sevilla and there was a pavilion there entitled “Spain Treasures”, where we admired works from Velazquez, Murillo, Goya, El Greco, Picasso, Dalí, etc. At the end there was a painting by Miró. My 10 years old son was with me admiring everything and when he saw the Miró he said, “I can do that”.

On the other hand, Dalí’s museum in his hometown in northern Catalonia has many beautiful painting and other wonderful works of art from this man who really knew what he was doing when he painted that piece of bread that caught my attention for long time admiring it. Dalí and Picasso were I believe true artists who went laughing to the bank when they gave to the “art critics” what they wanted and profit from this kind of snobbism, but at the same time both of them knew perfectly what they wanted to do, while Miró painted the only things he was able to paint. I don’t like cubism and many of the works from Picasso, but in the Gothic Neighborhood in Barcelona there are beautiful works from early Picasso that were beautiful to my eyes and soul. 

As you can see, I don’t know what art is, I simply like something and don’t like other things. I respect other’s taste and sensibility, and all those who like the Kinkade paintings but all those “works of art” exhibited in the George Pompidou Center, the Reina Sofia Museum and the Miro Museum I simply cannot understand and I leave it there, and finish with the sentence of that wise man who said it perfectly right: “Entre tu arte y mi arte, major mi…arte.”