What Art is for

Maybe.

Tanner Christensen

I sat looking at a particularly peculiar painting draped across one of the spotlessly white walls of the Dallas Museum of Art.

For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to feel about the painting. I thought perhaps that was the point. Maybe it was a piece of canvas colored with random splatters of paint that was always meant to act as a psychological mirror, forcing the observer to look inward, rather than out.

But when I caught myself thinking that the artwork was a type of creative mirror, I realized such thoughts feel less like a valuable insight and more like some snobbish art elitism. The type of stuff you’d hear a skinny guy in a black turtleneck muse onto house guests while sipping wine from a champagne glass.

The best insights always feel like self betrayal.

I was in Texas to see a concert, not to stare at paintings. The band I was there to see consisted of a sole man with a guitar. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but I flew over 1,000 miles to stand in a room with six or seven other people and listen to stranger strum a guitar while recanting stories of old love, heartache, the human condition and all that.

His music, and particularly the lyrics, resonated strongly with me. I chose to fly the thousand or so miles from Salt Lake City to Denton, Texas, to hear him sing in person in hopes that, somehow, he would spill his secret to moving on from heartache. To being a better and more capable human being.

My hopes were that he could serve as a reflection of myself that was more well-defined, more put together. Like trying to look at myself in a cracked mirror with gaping holes and then being able to turn and see a more flawless mirror of who I was supposed to be, the musician.

But, just as with the painting, as I stood in that bar and listened to the music that felt were just as about my life and my stories as they were the musicians, I felt betrayed. This time, however, it felt as though someone, somewhere, understood that betrayal. I wasn’t alone in my attempt at figuring things — most notably, myself—out.

And I think that’s a universal truth for all art.

Art stands as an expression of something, even when that’s not the intention of the artist. If the work doesn’t stand for the emotions and stories of the artist or creator, then it stands for a moment in time that allowed that creator to make it. A record of a time and place and the history of all mankind. It sounds more poetic than it really is.

Much of the contemporary or even street art I see today exemplifies this notion.

Great art is art that forces us to step back and think, and even without intending to make great art many of us do. Artists invoke thinking. If not about the work itself, or the impact the work has, then of the artwork in the context of you, yourself, the observer, as a perfectly flawed person.

All great art does this.

Art puts us into a position where we have no choice but to look into the cracked mirror that is our self-perception and realize that there is no better mirror to look at. There are only more cracked and broken mirrors that, when combined together, make something we can only define as either the human condition or history.

And that’s valuable for each of us. Even though we feel silly when we see a gold-plated toilet or a graffiti stencil of a rat holding a “will work for trash” sign. They tell our story, even when we didn’t realize we had a story to tell.