Across history, art has been used decoratively, commercially, and politically, deemed both essential for human life and outlawed as highly dangerous. The physical products of art have diversified significantly, with constant innovation in techniques and materials, and technology allowing art to expand into digital fields. So, throughout the past and especially in this ever-changing modern age, a question is posed – what even is art?
To answer this question, it is essential to think about multiple categories of art, so I will start with my speciality – literature. Discussing art and the meaning of art always circles back to the artist, who initially decides what their piece of art will look like and intends to do (or, in some cases, opts to create freely without intention as a decision of its own). The intention of the artist was of specific interest to William Wordsworth, one of the primary writers of the Romantics era of literature in the 18th century where personal voice and the use of ‘I’ began to become an essential feature of creation. In the 1802 preface to his and Coleridge’s joint project Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth asks a question comparable to ours, ‘What is a poet?’, and offers a certain answer.
He describes a poet as someone ‘endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind’. Of course, he is biased and carries a certain air of self-importance for his occupation that most Romantics held, however dismissing the aspect of praise there is an important focus on ‘sensibility’, emotions such as ‘enthusiasm and tenderness’, and on the depths of feeling defining ‘human nature’ and a ‘comprehensive soul’.
Wordsworth goes further to declare not only a poet’s internal make-up but their creative intention and comes back to the same emotional ideas. He claims that the poet has ‘an ability of conjuring up in himself passions’ which readers ‘are accustomed to feel in themselves’, using a ‘greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels’. In other words, writing about experiences in such a way that a poet has the ‘power’ to evoke their own personal emotions, or ‘passions’, in readers. So, if a poet is one type of artist, then the same may be said for all artists. Art becomes the product of an artist’s emotive intentions, and therefore I propose that art itself is something that echoes the complex feelings of life and generates them in the viewer. Art is, in process and in product, the experience of human emotion.
Next, I want to analyse a modern type of art, which leads me to technology and film. Recently, I watched I Saw the TV Glow (2024) written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun at a showing by the Sheffield Students’ Union Film Unit. The psychological horror explores identity, following main-character Owen from teen years to adulthood in a seemingly ordinary world and considering this growth in parallel to a supernatural TV show ‘The Pink Opaque’.
Without spoiling the film too much, it displays the consequences of refusing to be your true self and living as someone you aren’t using physical threat and illness, containing a heavy and non-subtle allegory surrounding gender specifically. It’s safe to say that this film would deeply unsettle anyone, no matter your personal identity, presenting the experience of needing to live a certain way, and feeling as though it is off limits or simply being too scared to face it. The main result of this film, in my opinion, is to make you think.
Owen questions everything throughout the film, from gender to technology to people to the fabric of the world itself, in an almost dreamlike trance, and the viewer is led to do the same. Ultimately, the effect is harrowing and extends beyond the final credits into the viewer’s own world, with the fundamentally similar setting and Owen’s unawareness generating the same threatening possibilities in us. Watching this piece of art makes us think and question for ourselves. Art is, in process and in product, the tendency to question and think deeply.
Lastly, we come to the narrower definition of art as a physical, visual product. I have chosen to discuss one well-known example, ‘Starry Night’ by Vincent Van Gogh. Since its creation in 1889, ‘Starry Night’ has been shared worldwide and continuously studied and imitated. Van Gogh’s iconic painting has been viewed as a display of his deteriorating mental health, a representation of death, of a graveyard, but also of religion, of a state of shock, of ‘starry’-eyed hope, of a dream… the list goes on.
Many have attempted to analyse the brushstrokes, the colours, and Van Gogh’s life to gather their interpretations. However, no one can come to a definite conclusion. How can a piece of art be so important and well-known if we do not know what it represents? I can suggest one, possibly bizarre answer – that the true meaning of ‘Starry Night’ does not matter at all.
Each interpretation brings forward subjective viewpoints and biases based on personal experiences. No two are exactly the same, as no two people are. This creative possibility is what makes it art; any seemingly simple image or video or text may be seen as wildly complex, regardless of the artist’s intention. Art is, in process and in product, the understanding of differing interpretations and their causes.
In conclusion, to me art is something that generates any emotion in the reader, that makes you think and question and wonder, and something that offers various personal perspectives. Except, that’s not really a conclusion. If you combine each aspect, art becomes many different things at once, from unique emotions to thoughts to interpretations, and cannot be defined. So, really, art is an inherently personal experience of all three at once, and becomes truly anything you want it to be.
