I used to take museums for granted. Until college, all they meant to me was a field trip, forced learning and standing on your feet for what felt like hours to slowly parade through rooms with pictures on the wall — silently (which I will never understand). But as I began to critically view famous paintings that I had known about my whole life, I questioned, what is it about this? The consistent theme drawing me to each one was the fact that a human created it to represent something, to express and to provide an experience, a moment and an interpretation. Art is not only in museums. Everyone can appreciate art because art is everywhere you go.
Why should I care about some woman’s portrait and her famous half smile? Why should I care about a huge canvas with house paint that looks likes throw up all over all it? The only reason I care is because of the experience, the humanism, the emotional capacity humans create in relationship to one another. When we view art, we view ourselves. We view what it means to be human and what it means to have the ability to relate to people and materials, physically and emotionally. There is a reason why the question, “What is art?” has been constantly altered, changed, argued and debated for centuries. Art is always present, we are creative creatures inhabiting an Earth we manipulate and maneuver. Art is everywhere. The question is, "Are you really looking?"
You do not need to go to a museum to know what art is. You do not need to know about the importance of the Mona Lisa or why Jackson Pollock splattered paint onto large canvases. We must understand that humans have always created; we are creatures that have been granted the ability to discover and rediscover. Ordinary things can always be seen differently, as human’s we always find new interpretations, new discoveries. What limits people’s ideas of art is the fact that they don’t see it has present or relevant. But that’s not even the problem with art, that’s a problem with museums and what we refer to as the high art world. It is possible to experience art without a museum. We are often just too stuck in a habitual routine, similar scenery and a consistent way of going about our daily lives to make us feel “normal.”
We have shorter our attention span for art, for the artful and for things seen in a new, special way. We’ve all had an experience of going to a new place with new surroundings and feeling an alert, primitive sense of being, absorbing in everything you can with an innocent curiosity. You seem to notice the cracks in the pavement and the color of the street lamps, and you ask why? You take pictures of things that a person who has lived there for their whole life would roll their eyes at. But why can’t we always have those experiences? You can. Art is accessible to everyone who is willing to look and see. Art may save your life one day, so stop and look around once and a while and question, question, question. Everything.
