Nothing has been said yet about the pleasure of art.     To many,   art is an ornament of life -– the picture that “brightens” the living room,   the bric-a-brac on the mantle,   the decorative front of a (possibly ugly) building,   the curtain of loveliness drawn over the dreariness  of ordinary things.     Art has,   in fact,   served as an embellishment of life in many periods,   though this has usually not been its most important function;  more gener­ally (as you will discover in this course) it has  served some more urgent and practical purpose.     But,   while not always the end of art,   pleasure has always been its by-product.

Not everybody is equipped to enjoy art.     Just as there are some who have no taste for food,   no ear for music or who take no delight in dancing,   there are many who are “blind” to art.     Enjoyment cannot be taught or acquired through effort,   unless there is  some native pre-disposition to it:    the enjoyment of art requires a kind of talent.     Fortunately, many people possess this talent and through it gain entrance to a world of intense pleas­ure.     So deep,   so lastingly rewarding are the pleasures that art gives,   that the search for them can become something of an obsession.     Art can become a narcotic  (a harmless one, fortunately),   a source of such happiness that life without it is felt to be unbearable.

But the pleasure which art gives is never automatic; its enjoyment can never be a mere “drinking in” or gourmandizing of beauty:    it comes only as the reward of effort,   and the keener the effort,   the greater the pleasure.     Mere exposure to a work of art is not enough. The work must be understood,   both by the mind and by the senses.     And while the basic “talent” necessary for the enjoyment of art cannot be learned,   the understanding of art, the unriddling of its forms and meanings can be acquired.     For it is founded on the know­ledge of facts,   and on ideas that can be grasped by the mind.     It is not a mystery.     There is  a parallel between language and art -–  both can be understood only through knowledge

It is merely a man-made   thing –  a shaped mass of stone or metal,   a building,    or a surface   covered   with paint.     But how different it is from other man-made   things,    from those   necessary but   perishable objects of daily use,   from the tools   of work   and  war,    and   all the rest of the   busywork of mankind!     For   thousands of years,    men have made clothing,   built houses and   constructed machinery.     What has be­come of this  enormous   production?    It has  served   its purpose   and perished.

Consider,    for   example,    the case of Egypt  which existed as a powerful and productive state for Z, 500   years,    far longer than any   of the nations   now   in existence.     Today,   only ruins and   scattered   remnants   of this   great culture remain.     Some   of these are interest­ing   documents   of life in ancient times.     But Egyptian taxation,   sanitation or carpentry are   of deep   interest   only to specialists,   while   the art of Egypt   still has   the power to move and  to instruct us.     There   are,   to be sure,   profound   lessons to be learned from the Egyptian experience   as recorded   in the religious   creeds,   the philosophies,   the laws and   political institutions   of ancient   Egypt.     But nowhere is this experience expressed more vividly,   more   completely and more beautifully than in art.     In its art,   something of Egypt’s   long-dead civilization  has   survived and   still speaks to us.

For art has   a power   which   other works   of man  do not have.     It preserves life,   so to speak,    and transmits vital thoughts and   feelings from one era to the next.     The great  permanence of art is not a matter of physical durability:    many works of art are very fragile indeed.     Its  permanence is,   rather,   the result of care.     Deliberately or instinc­tively,   men have sought to preserve art from destruction,   compelled by their admiration (and sometimes fear) of its powerful life.     An astonishingly large amount of art has  sur­vived the endless wars,   revolutions and migrations of nations which have  swept away nearly all other works of man.     The Greeks respected something in the art of Egypt, though they had little respect for the Egyptians; the Romans admired the art of the Greeks whom they had conquered; the early Christians borrowed much from pagan art,   while they ruthlessly destroyed pagan religion.     Today,   we are linked through art with the cultures of remote periods.     Some of the feelings which inspired the Greek sculptor of 2000 years ago reawaken in us as we look at his work.     Through art we can share the emotions and the wisdom of other times and other cultures.     Art,   in short,   is the most durable and the most profound record of man,   a grand diary in which age after age has summed up its ex­perience of life.

Burgkmair 1501

It is very difficult to stake out clearly the boundaries which separate art from non-art. As suggested above, this requires a judgment of value, i. e. the separation of the good from the ordinary, average, or bad. We shall try to come to grips with this problem in a later lesson. In addition to the problem of quality, there is that of the objectives, the aims of art. These have often been formulated, usually without any very conclusive results.

Here are some of the most common attempts at defining the objectives of art:
1. Art should be the Imitation (or Interpretation) of Nature. We shall thoroughly discuss this and the following views in later posts.
2. Art is the Self-Expression of a Great Personality.
3. Art is the Creation of Beauty,
4. Art is a Language for the Conveying of Great Ideas.

And there are others. Each contains an element of truth, is partly true — but if applied singly, narrowly, each hopelessly distorts the meaning of art.

There are, in fact, many baffling mysteries about art which will probably never be resolved. What, for ex­ample, is the exact psychological nature of what we call “talent”? Why is it a fact that the contribution of women to the visual arts has been negligible? Why is art so largely independent of high levels of civilization (great art has been produced by savages) or of material prosperity (great art has been pro­duced in times of deep misery)? We shall not resolve these questions, but we shall raise them and discuss them, and they will increase our understanding of art.

For the time being, let us frame this tentative and modest definition: Art is the form (visual and tactile) into which men may translate their experience of life -– regardless of whether this experience be drawn from the observation of nature or from the imagin­ation. Whether or not this imaginative record of experience carries a specific mes­sage, it has the power of illuminating thought and feeling and can arouse intense pleas­ure in those who receive it with sympathy.