What is art? How do you define art? An even better question: what is the purpose of art?
Towards the beginning of the first World War, two painters were experimenting with a simplistic, African‒inspired painting style. Eventually what began as an experiment in art form by Picasso and Braque would ultimately become a cubist art movement, producing tremendous amount of unique works.
At the time, no painters were focusing on simplicity or straight lines. Back then the majority of paintings were focused on realism or artistic interpretation, but rarely simplicity and even rarer to focus on how straight a line was.
Still, the cubist movement marched forward, inspiring artists around the globe.
If you were to look at a cubist painting today, you may find yourself asking the questions posed at the beginning of this article: “What is art? How do you define art? What is the purpose?”
Unfortunately the questions so many amateur artists or art lovers ask are often the wrong ones. As Jonathan Jones explains in his article The joy of cubism, art should primarily be for our enjoyment, not interpretation.
Jones says:
…if you can relax your gaze enough and just enjoy the painting long enough, something really amazing happens […]: a chemistry in your process of perception produces a solid feeling of the things Picasso was looking at, that he was touching with his brain ‒ the fruit, the bottle, the newspaper, the cafe table. A place and a time swim darkly into view; the world is revealed in its majesty. And this is fun.
When you consider art as a form of traveling through time and space ‒ as a way to see what the artist saw in a temporary moment ‒ it becomes something more than a painting or sculpture or drawing or lettering.
What if we looked at more objects and artistic works as perception‒enhancers, rather than just objects for use or interpretation? What if we relaxed when looking at a drawing, rather than being critical of it’s lines?