As we know, today, art has developed into a large variety of works, from paintings, sculptures, architecture, design, kinetic, to digital art. The art interpretative discourse has also grown from the eighteen century to the contemporary age. Considering the complex kind of art and the discourse about it, is it still possible for everyone to appreciate art?
First of all, what is art appreciation? Noël Carroll’s article “Art Appreciation” (2016) can help us to understand what art appreciation is. Carroll mentions two leading conceptions of art appreciations, which are ‘to cherish’ and ‘to calculate the value of something’.
Firstly, ‘to appreciate’ is ‘to cherish’ in the sense of giving appreciation as liking. For example, “I appreciate your painting”, which means “I like your painting”. This kind of appreciation is a subjective judgment, related to our liking or not liking of the object. This judgment does not mean preclude the possibility of an intersubjective standard of taste.
The second conception is derived from the Latin appretiare, which means “to appraise” or “to fix a price”. ‘To appreciate’ means ‘to calculate the value of something, to assess it, or to size it up”. In contrast to the first conception, the second conception is impersonal. For example, art critics appreciate a painting by sizing up the color, composition, lines, and structures. The second conception of appreciation is an objective judgment, in the sense someone judge art based on the elements of the object.
From the eighteen until the nineteenth century, the art interpretation emphasizes the detachment of art from a political and religious framework. In this modern philosophy view, works of art are treated as autonomous aesthetic objects. Art and the aesthetic seem to gradually be autonomous and apart from human everyday activity.
Back to the initial question, can everyone appreciate art? In contrast to the modern view that asserts disinterested aesthetics, I argue that everyone can appreciate art because art is primarily about the relation between artworks and our everyday lives. Humans’ experience is necessary for art appreciation.
Following Lars-Olof Ahlberg (1999), in appreciating artwork, we do not have to adopt, what modern philosophy called, aesthetic attitude. Aesthetic attitude suppresses everything we know, feel, or think about life and reality. On the contrary, we need “an awareness of who we are” to interpret and appreciate the artwork. Technical or quasi-technical vocabularies for analyzing and interpreting art are needed, but they are not everything.
The art critics often draw an association between art and non-art phenomena both mental and physical in describing the artwork. They usually employ everyday life adjectives, that are normally applied to light, to weight, to movement, to smell, to taste, to touch, and to atmosphere. For example, sparkling, bright, bitter, gentle, smiling, sad, soft, melting, and many others. It shows that art appreciation does not live in ‘isolation’, ‘purity’, and ‘discontinuity’ between art and humans’ experience.
To appreciate art, firstly, we need to master the normal use of everyday words, like bright, smiling, or sad. “We should know what a bright sky looks like, what it means to smile, and what sadness is”. Ahlberg argues that experience of language use is a necessary condition for applying these adjectives to metaphorically describe the artwork.
However, it does not mean we must have experienced the death of loved ones to comment on artwork about the loved ones’ death. An artwork is interesting because it addressed imagination, rather than the capacity for make-believe. Therefore, we need to involve our imagination to understand fictive characters and events.
Eventually, for me, ‘Everyone can appreciate art’. In appreciating art, we delve into our own experiences. A piece of art has a different meaning to every person who reflects it, but it is not impossible to find similar feelings in other viewers.
Furthermore, art appreciation also matters for everyone. Art appreciation helps us to open up our mindset, by listening to different perspectives. It also enhances our empathy by putting ourselves to understand fictive characters or events. Art appreciation is also necessary for creating a good art ecosystem by giving judgment and criticism that will improve the quality of artworks.