Art in Life

We were talking about whether or not it was an essential feature of art that it is placed on a pedestal within an art gallery in discussion today. Some were of the opinion that art forces you to look at a representation of something in the world and allows you to contemplate it further by removing its potential for serving some purpose. The example was one of Van Gogh's paintings of a pair of shoes and the point was that we couldn't possibly try them on or anything (obviously). But some of us, myself included, felt that this contemplation that occurs when we view a painting could conceivably occur outside of the art gallery when viewing a normal pair of shoes in the corner of the room. Granted, we don't go about life contemplating the aesthetic qualities in everything we see as we travel from home to school or walk up the stairs leading to our destination. Yet it seems possible to look out upon the world as one walks and really feel the world. It's funny that one of my qualms with the Heidegger text that we have read for class was that his descriptions of our experience were quite unintelligible to me and yet as soon as I try philosophizing for myself I immediately run into the same problem and use the phrase "feel the world". I guess what I mean to say is that it seems that we have the capacity to utilize our imagination at any moment in our lives, whether we are in front of a work of art at a gallery or merely walking across the Sproul Courtyard, and extrapolate meaning out of the experiences that we have.

I don't mean to suggest that art has no value since we can just do it on our own anyway. What I do mean is that our experiences can have aesthetic qualities if we are in the right mindset. What is unique about art galleries is that they force you to look at certain objects in this aesthetic mode. Art invites and indeed demands that we view the artwork with a critical eye and opens the floor for a never-ending discussion regarding the work's meaning.

Many of us go through the motions of everyday life and seek that which gives us pleasure or increases the potential of achieving some future pleasure and sometimes forget just how amazing our experience really is. This might seem to be a cliche observation but it seems very true to me. In fact, I actually tried looking at the dusty steps of Wheeler hall as I was walking up them and glean some scintilla of aesthetic quality in them as my feet slowly raised me closer and closer to the second floor. Surely there couldn't be anything aesthetic in them. But then I started realizing that the experience of them was quite amazing because experience itself is amazing. It is amazing that the stairs show up for me, that I can navigate them so easily, even the fact that I could have gone my entire life without thinking twice about these steps. Of course, the stairs in Wheeler hall is most definitely not art. Why? Because they didn't force me to think about them, I went looking for any trace of aesthetic quality that they could show me. Also, I did not find them beautiful, in fact, I think that even I could design a more aesthetically pleasing flight of stairs. I think Professor Noe puts it quite well when he says that "art is something we do." I am starting to feel that art was never in the objects that we see in the galleries but is in the effect it produces in us.

Maybe I'll try expanding this post in the future but for now I should really get to writing my legal studies paper.