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We discuss under Music how it is appreciated to a greater or lesser degree by different people. This is much more so with the visual arts, painting and sculpture, but also photography, architecture, fashion or pottery, when these take art form.

Most people have an instinct for the aesthetic to some degree, when they match their clothes or choose carefully where to hang a picture on the wall, so they might also say that they like a painting very much. And we do recognise that this instinctive desire varies from person to person and culture to culture. However, art goes way beyond the aesthetic, to convey universal truth and communicate an experience to others. And this is more difficult to appreciate.

Lack of appreciation is partly through lack of contact with the visual arts, especially in the early years of life. But it may also be due to some people's genetic makeup - we do not all share the same gifts or intelligence, or the same vision of the world, and true art demands so much of the human brain. All our brains are wired in different ways, from birth.

Most people without a visual education grow up thinking that art is a matter of individual taste and, like all the biggest lies, this also contains a small element of truth. That is how we end up with people judging a painting by whether they would hang it on their wall, and photographs by whether they like the item or person portrayed, rather than this particular image of them. While a piece of sculpture maybe something totally alien to them - and we talk about that later.

It is also true that not all photographs or paintings, nor all sculpture and architecture is art, and then it is perfectly legitimate to judge on more practical considerations, rather than judge it as art.

And to make things even worse, we all frequent buildings, we are surrounded by paintings on the walls or pictures on the printed page, and we take photos with mobile phones, which may deceive us into thinking we are familiar with the arts.

So it needs to be repeated here a) that true art is what reveals a universal truth, probably unrecognised, b) transmits an experience and, what flows from the above, c) that the purpose of art is not for decoration or entertainment. We deal with the latter under The Arts in General.

The above may help to pinpoint the difference between a painting or a studio photograph which 'captures just right' your favourite person, and, on the other hand, a portrait that goes beyond the individual character of the sitter to certain universal implications, which arise out of the range and depth of the artist's genius, in other words, a work of art.

The purpose of this editorial is not to engage in debate those already familiar or devoted to the arts, but to address good minds who, for whatever reason, never understood how to approach the visual arts. Such minds tend to look or ask for logical, or at least verbal justifications for a work of art, then proceed to judge the words they have just heard, as opposed to the work itself in front of them. Should they look at the brush-strokes? Do they mark it for likeness to the subject? Or indeed, would they have it in their own home?

But, to repeat, paintings (or any art) are not for the purpose of decorating the walls of our houses or galleries. If we need galleries to exhibit art, they should be viewed as libraries of visual riches where one can peruse ideas, perhaps new and strange, in the same way one loves discovering things in books. I have often wished that each gallery and every collector of art would issue a DVD of all their art for people to buy in the same way we buy or borrow books or music. And it would be profitable too.

Rodin, The Kiss

Herbert Read wrote that the art of sculpture is notoriously difficult to appreciate, and blamed the Renaissance for depreciating it as less intellectual, in favour of painting.

I do not know that sculpture is more or less difficult, but it certainly is difficult. When I visited the Rodin museum in Paris, I was struck how every single 'admirer' stood briefly in front of each work as if it were a painting, instead of walking round it, clearly unsure how to approach this object or what to make of it. To ask what ideas Rodin was trying to put across with his work would have been beyond them, and so Herbert Read was probably right - sculpture is indeed difficult to appreciate. Appreciation of art depends on so much more that looking, one has to know how to respond.

The same could be said of art critics who concentrate on the life of the artist, the history or other significance of a work of art, at the expense of (to repeat) a) whether it reveals some universal truth, or b) if it transmits an experience.

Long before Rodin, the Greeks had regarded sculpture as the supreme art. In his 1969 BBC TV series Civilisation, historian Kenneth Clark contrasted Greek to other sculpture and said, "The Northern imagination takes shape in an image of fear and darkness; the Hellenistic imagination in an image of harmonised proportion and human reason - a higher state of civilisation." The Greeks demanded the most sensibility from both artist and spectator, but one cannot just decide one will look with sensibility; only a visual education (not necessarily formal education) can procure an intelligent response.

Beauty

A question that always arises in connection with the visual arts is that of beauty. What is beauty, must it be present in art, and is beauty a subjective quality? Indeed, is beauty what art is about in the first place?

Some assume that all that is beautiful is art, or that all art is beautiful, and what is not beautiful is not art.

We will deal with this simply by invoking, by repetition, the above primary statement that art a) must reveal a universal truth, and b) transmit an experience. No mention of beauty here then, but beauty is very important as a form of truth and the reason for its absence from our definition is the common use of the word. Lovers may say to each other, 'you look very beautiful' and mean it, when both may look quite ordinary, even plain. Conversely, a Greek figure by Phidias, a Byzantine icon, a modern abstract painting and a savage idol from Africa cannot all belong to the same concept of beauty, yet all of them may be beautiful as works of art. Socrates told us two thousand years ago that defining beauty was very difficult. What is perceived as visual beauty not only changes from one person to the next, from era to era, and differs in other parts of the world, but changes in the same person at different times.

This does not mean that beauty is entirely subjective, 'in the eye of the beholder.' No, it is not; beauty, like truth, is universal and when it is not recognised, the fault lies with the observer and his personal or cultural preconceptions. But what this means is that beauty cannot be the measure of what constitutes art. So, as in music, one who is keen to appreciate the visual arts must be open to all those other ways of looking, whether contemporary, African primitive, classical Greek, Chinese, Gothic etc., always with a view to judging art by the absence or presence of meaning, otherwise the artefact would not qualify as art, and would be just a pretty object of ephemeral significance, subject to the mood of the viewer. Subjective beauty, i.e. divorced from truth or meaning, is no more than a layer of cosmetics which tells you nothing about the character behind a face, or a bouquet of plastic flowers that deceive you but have no fragrance, or any embellishment used on an ugly but necessary object - all of which may have a practical application at times, but cannot change the true status of the object.

As we set out elsewhere, beauty can only be true, and therefore beauty may be found in art which does not look pleasing to the eye at first glance. The identification of subjective beauty with art is the reason for all our problems in the appreciation of art, and even in people who are sensitive to the aesthetic, this assumption acts like blinkers - it reinforces the falsehood that what constitutes art is a matter of personal taste.

This is not to denigrate love of a work of art for its visual beauty - and how precious it is to have and to see a thing of beauty in a mostly utilitarian and often ugly world. We would only redirect those who look for beauty in art to find it also in meaning, as opposed to just the colours, shapes, subject-matter or craftsmanship of their taste. Then the beauty of other art, which they did not appreciate first time round, would also become apparent to them, just like a scientist might rightly appreciate beauty in an equation or a theory, only after he has seen its significance.

One might add, art must have meaning worth conveying, and the Greeks believed that all art should aspire to elevating man to a higher state of being, what we call civilisation. Some may dispute this and argue that it is legitimate for art to represent the world 'as it is,' not always as we would like it to be. It is a moot point, but the proof is in the eating, and generalisations are dangerous. Each piece of work must stand in its own right, and a judgement must be made as to whether the experience being transmitted is worth having.

Picasso's Guernica portrays a very ugly, unpleasant subject but the power of his antiwar message lies in his choice of language, which is profound as opposed to repulsive or shocking, and therefore the painting is beautiful and more effective as a result. There is no blood and gore in Guernica because that would reduce the painting from art to a newspaper snapshot. No art can elevate the trivial into something else - that would be lying. Truth and beauty are inextricably linked. The horror of war is much more than what you might see in an operating theatre or a car accident. Neither is Guernica an antiwar poster. Like a great portrait painter whose genius reveals something universal through this particular subject, Picasso portrays war in general through Guernica, and so the meaning of the painting is not a political slogan against one particular adversary.

When we talk of meaning in the arts, we mean universal truth, not a social, political or other partisan point a bogus artist is trying to make; not a slogan. Such aims would compromise artistic merit, as in Nazi or Soviet so-called art. Conversely, those who talk of 'the socio-political' or 'historical context' of a truly great work of art, do not elevate its significance by doing so, and might demean it. Such considerations are just points of interest, and secondary to its greater meaning.

What we must look for in the visual arts is truth which could not have been revealed through words or any other medium, otherwise there was no point in doing the painting or whatever the work happens to be.

Picasso, Guernica

This implies that not all art can be appreciated instantaneously, by liking or disliking it, as Theodor Lipps and others theorised. Perhaps the difference is cultural, or even genetic, in the sense that a Greek philosopher would be far more likely to suspend his emotional response until his cerebral self had more time to absorb the full meaning of the work - and it is this difference that defines Greek civilisation from all others. Be that as it may, I do believe that for all educated eyes, it often takes time to grasp the full significance of a particular work, and only then can we appreciate it and arrive at a response which is more apt, an intelligent response.

© John K Smyrniotis
London 2018

Organic Form Studies (above)
and photographs (left)
by the author John K Smyrniotis.