Art can refer to many things, such as music, film, dance, literature and painting, and it can be interpreted in many ways. In general, art consists of paintings, sculpture, and other pictures or objects that are created for people to look at and admire of think deeply. It can also help us to express our feelings and most of them are the ones that we cannot express through words. “Art is a lie that brings us nearer to the truth” is a claim said by Pablo Picasso. Although he was mainly a painter and a sculptor, we do not necessarily have to interpret this claim from an artistic point of view, even if I will mainly focus it on visual arts.
In my opinion, referring to this quotation, truth is equal to reality, which is everything that surrounds us, such as landscapes and animals, while art represents our thoughts. This means that art helps us to understand better the world, the real things. In addition, I think that Picasso meant that art is a lie, mainly because it’s not a real concrete thing. By saying this, I mean that a painting, for example, is an image of something and not the thing itself. Art is just a representation of the real life, that seems to be true with elements from the world, but in reality it isn’t.
Before this survey, we might have thought that each country had its own preferred artwork, but when it was done, the results were very impressing. According to this survey, most of the people prefer a painting that it is mainly a blue landscape, with a mountain, lake and a few wild animals. Melamid, who is one of the two Russian artists that organized this survey, said that “countries shouldn’t try to define themselves by culture, as culturally we’re much more similar than we want to admit. “1 This proves that most of the people prefer art as a representation of real life.
Language is one of the four ways of knowing and it is needed to communicate people’s thoughts, feelings and many other things. It is very related to art because “it is a way for people to express what they feel in ways that you can’t do with words. “2 Sometimes, people cannot express certain feelings through oral or written language and therefore they may use art as a way to communicate. For example, most of the time, very small children, who don’t know to talk yet, may use drawings to express their opinion, beliefs or their sense of reality.
For example, many children draw their preferred superhero and they imagine representing it. They want this feeling to be true and this is why sometimes they also try to behave like superheroes. Most of the time, when you ask a person what is art, they will tell you that art includes painting, sculptures and all the artistic works done by human beings. However, I think that even the human beings can be classified as art because each one of us has his or her own personality and characteristic and emotion.
Emotion is another way of knowing that affects the way we perceive arts. Emotion is something that we have since our birth and it mainly represents our feelings. Since very little, babies already knew what were the things that looked good and the ones that looked bad. In fact, a psychologist, named Judith Langlois of the university of Texas, has shown that even infants share a sense of what’s attractive. He also said that the “kids that don’t read Vogue or watch TV, and they haven’t been touched by the media.
Yet they make the same judgements as adults. “3 This proves that we are attracted by the people that satisfy our sense of reality. Apparently, the statement may seem to be really specific because it relates the truth to the arts, but in reality it is not so because as I said at the beginning, art is something very broad and this make this statement too vague and it can be interpreted in many ways because each person has a different perception of art, truth and lie.
However, if we analyse this quotation to a specific art form, in this case visual arts, this sentence begins to be narrower and it’s easier to draw conclusions. From my point of view, people create arts because they have to express some feelings at the moment of its creation. It is like a way of describing how a person feel and then the artist try to understand his own true feeling by examining his own work.
Bibliography Moffat, Charles. “Pablo Picasso”, <http://www. lilithgallery. com/arthistory/cubism/Pablo-Picasso. html>. 1 Lamb, Christina. “What the whole world best like”. 2 Lawson, Susi. “Why Art is Essential in Our Public Schools”, <http://www. passion4art. com/articles/pubschool. htm>. 3 Cowley, Geoffery. “The Biology of Beauty”.
