Art through the eyes of the creator, the world

I was taking pictures last week, asking around to see if anyone knew of anything "artsy" on campus that I could shoot. A friend pulled me aside and offered to show me something that he said might not qualify as art, or something the Review would be interested in, but he said I was welcome to take a look.

This friend took me to his room, and gave me a quick explanation of what I was about to see.

He said that, a year ago Sept. 27, something had happened that had merited a campus-wide mailing. While he was walking in the Arb, two men had abducted him in a car and raped him.

As a method of therapy, he worked on a series of paintings in his art class that dealt with the incident. As he showed them to me, he said something to the effect that he had "never been a good artist." Yet after he hung the paintings in his room, he kept drawing.

When I saw his paintings, I physically reacted. This was the first time I'd had this type of gut reaction after looking at a painting, drawing or sculpture. I know I'm supposed to think a Monet is beautiful, but these paintings actually made my stomach knot up. The paintings explained what he felt and had gone through better than his words, and they did so in a way that I could feel it, not just know about it. After thinking about that for a while, I learned a bit more about what I consider to be art.

There's this running joke in the Review office as to what an Arts editor is. I didn't think I knew anything about art when I started - I'm not an art major, or even an artist, and I've never taken art classes.

I don't know how to define art. Language seems inadaquate. Despite dictionary definitions and what people define it as, nothing has sounded good to me so far. There are all the adages - "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "beauty is as beauty does" - but what makes something beautiful or good and what makes someone an artist, or gives someone the ability to appreciate art?

I have a friend, a dancer, who thinks art isn't accessible to the public, that they don't have what it takes to understand and appreciate it. In her opinion, what artists create comes out of their dissatisfaction with the everyday, mainstream world. Art isn't something that you learn, it's something that you have.

If more people opened their minds to the idea that certain experiences and emotions lend themselves to art, and that "ordinary people" can be artists, the art world wouldn't be so intimidating and exclusive. Maybe my friend could've worked through his rape experience without feeling intimidated. Maybe I could go into a museum without fearing what people would think, or even have the nerve to draw something without knowing beforehand that it wouldn't be "good."

At a certain point, art's self-consciousness distances its creators and its audience, and something aobut the definition. Sometimes self-expression is an end in itself.