Art illiteracy

When was the last time you went to a museum, bought an art book or stopped for 10 minutes to look at a work of art you came across online? Probably you are missing something from the beauty of life. It can be taught, going deeper in an image and taking out the juice of joy, of being alive and deciding for yourself what makes you grow (as opposed to doing what everyone else does, because it’s trendy). But most people hate learning and we have the parents and the schools to thank for that. Most people “read” an image at the surface, this is how we got to the point of valuing the “new and shocking”, this is why “artists” such as Demien Hirst, Tracy Emin, etc exist: they “challenge your brains” and move art from what art is good for to snobbing you with “I thought of this first!”. We all look at a van Gogh, we all see a different thing, we all understand a different thing. That understanding of art is not done with the brain. That special understanding is made in a state of being which, if not developed and kept alive, is drying out. And so, we become beings chasing something we think we know, to fill a hole in ourselves that we think we understand.