What is art? This is a question for which the answer is getting more and more blurry as time goes by. In the past, artists were sent to schools where they learned the strict guidelines and rules for making art, which they had to follow in order to make a living for them selves. If they wanted to be able to find work, or sell their paintings, they had to follow the rules of proportion, lighting, and perspective. As you can see from the classical period, the style was clearly defined, and what constituted ‘good’ art was easily discernible.
However, these rules and standards highly limited what an artist could do, and what methods he could use to produce the type of outcome that he wanted. This all changed around the time when French painter Edouard Manet decided to break the rules and paint figures that were outside of the accepted norms of his day. His loose brush strokes and ‘suggesting’ shapes without fully drawing them were only a few of the things that set him apart from his more classical contemporaries. He had a knack for painting controversial subjects. Unlike most artists, who painted mostly mythological, religious, and formal themes, Manet painted people in more casual settings and sought to capture the lighting on his subjects. His paintings were a far cry from what was expected of a classically trained artist, and many other artists decided to follow suit and break away from the old rules. This led to a number of new methods, including surrealism, expressionism, and cubism, and the age of modern art was born.
The styles of art during this time reflected the social and political climate of the day, with many artists giving their art a more ‘real’ feel by portraying life in all its imperfect glory. In the past, artists painted very idealistic figures, even omitting any imperfections on a person’s face when painting portraits. But modern artists often drew the nitty-gritty details of life that were often ignored and hidden. They sought to wake up a world that was in denial about the way things really were. In time, artists started going to the extreme and started creating art more for its shock value than for its aesthetic or emotional appeal.
This has gotten to the point where a dead sheep in formaldehyde isn’t just accepted as a work of art, but actually wins first place in a contemporary art contest. A lot of people are growing disgusted by this type of ‘art’ and the question ‘what is art?’ is something that now has to be answered on an individual basis. Art schools are having a very hard time teaching artists the skills they will need to be successful artists, when it seems that, in today’s world, just about anything that someone calls ‘art’ is indeed art. What many people find alarming is that so many people will go along with it and praise the artists for their innovation and graphic imagery, while in truth the ‘artist’ may just be pulling a big practical joke, trying to pass off a broken toilet as art. So, while it was clear in the past what constituted art and what was just rubbish, today art seems to be just about anything that ‘floats your boat’.
