Your Thoughts On Art

[Alan V]

But the main thing that puzzles me is why we should worry about it, as if we have some control over things. 

I can tell you are an artist by how you rationalize what artists do. No, Picasso is not more realistic than other artists. Sorry, fail. Nor Van Gogh. No one really sees the world those ways. They exaggerated to achieve their own aesthetic and emotional goals, which are fine but which I do not have rationalize myself.

We have some control over public opinions of these things. I consider it honest to point out that a well-informed person like myself, a person who has studied the visual arts for going on 50 years, thinks the explanations artists provide for their works is often hyper-rationalized and associative rather than accurate. Much of the talk of the so-called profundities of the arts is largely marketing. Visual arts are mostly entertainments, and if people don't find them entertaining it's probably not their fault -- especially if they can't swallow all the nonsense. If artists can't make their art understandable without explaining it, they may have failed as artists.