As our name suggests, here at Art2Arts our goal is to provide our customers with a platform to buy art online, whilst if you are an artist, you can also sell your artwork online via our virtual art gallery- but what is it that turns each piece of marked paper or canvas from being an inanimate object, to being accepted as a piece of artwork, ready to hang proudly on someone’s wall?
This question has been gathering speed over the past few weeks, following on from an amusing prank at the San Francisco museum of modern art late last month that reminded the world of art of the power of perception! A pair of glasses placed in an empty space at a modern art exhibition soon gathered a crowd of onlookers, considering this pair of optical tools as a piece of art to be looked at.
One way in which art can be defined is something that we have touched on earlier previously in our blog post ‘The Intertwined Worlds of Art and Design’:
“Purpose: This is the most fundamental difference between the two disciplines. Art asks questions whilst design answers them.”
The purpose of art is to have no ‘purpose’ as such, aiming to inspire a feeling or a reaction and stimulate our minds. When you apply this thought to the glasses prank at the San Francisco art museum, then you can see how the two jokers had in fact, inadvertently, created art by presenting an object to be interpreted by its onlookers, rather than to be used for its function. Similar to the ‘Readymade’ art series by philosopher and artist Marcel Duchamp, by taking a useful object (A urinal or a bicycle wheel in the case of Duchamp), removing its usefullness and giving it a new suggested meaning by re-naming the item, a piece of art is then created, that can be interoperated in many ways by the viewer.
Whilst you won’t find us selling any ‘re-worked’ urinals via our online art gallery (but we will never say never!), you will find lots of fabulous paintings for sale, and each and every one of them has been created in order to make those that look at it think differently, to inspire a mood or to provoke a memory, making them pieces of unique, original art.
What do you think it is that truly makes art, art? This really is an age-old question that will undoubtedly never be fully answered, but we’d love to see you, our readers and art fans, have a go at solving it!
