Art is a broad range of human endeavors, involving beauty, imagination, technical skill, esthetic appreciation, or other emotional power to express artistic expertise, esthetic beauty, personal passion, or even conceptual notions. Many critics and historians have classified art forms into three main categories: Modern art, Post-modern art, and Historical art. Modern art is the most eclectic of all and usually deals with popular culture or popular movements in society. It may also deal with abstract expression of feelings or with reality as it exists in the artist’s mind. It includes Pop art, Decora-art, and so on.
The term Decora – art refers to works of art that are not typically produced by contemporary artists but which exhibit a convergence of various aesthetic senses, producing a distinctive type of beauty. In essence, Decora-art is an “avant-garde” form of art. By avant-garde we mean artists who seek to define art through their own individual vision. A Pop artist might include such artists as Kenneth Noland, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Jim Ware, Frank Furter, Robert Rauschenberg, and many others. Historical art, on the other hand, is generally related to paintings made by famous or otherwise noteworthy painters, authors, or other professionals.
Art is, essentially, the subjective view of beauty expressed in any medium: This may take the form of an aesthetic appreciation of beauty in nature, an appreciation of beauty within a work of art, or even a personal definition of beauty, dependent upon your own cultural and social factors. However, no matter what form of art you take, beauty is always about the self. When you look at art, you are looking directly at your own subjective aesthetic sense of beauty, and thus you define art itself.
Painting, for instance: is an artistic endeavor to create an aesthetic and emotional response in the viewer. The beauty of a painting is derived from the skills and creative genius of the painter. But it is also derived from the emotions, the painter has chosen to portray in his painting. For instance, a famous work of art, El Greco’s Starry Night, offers a calm, peaceful scene, yet the calmness of the painting, the serene, and peaceful expression of the painting itself is evocative of hope, peace, and romanticism.
Similarly, when you look at a photograph: you are looking directly at something beautiful, something that transcends time and place, and thus is necessarily subjective to you and your culture and your experience of life. However, when you look at a painting, you are looking directly at something beautiful, something that is based in the realm of objective reality, and therefore predicated on a different set of criteria. What you look at when you look at a painting has a definite affect on your emotional response to the painting. This is the meaning of deep connection. The deeper your emotional response to something beautiful, the more its presence will evoke strong positive associations to your life.
So, whether you believe: that art exists purely in the mind of the artist or you believe that beauty is subjective, you would be correct. But the mind is only one part of the whole process. The other parts of the whole equation are the fine art world, your emotions, and the way you perceive beauty.
And in these three aspects, you will find what lies underneath the surface.
