Three Paintings That Changed The Way I Look At Art and Life

This is how philosophy, life, and beauty get a voice

ART!?

‘one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture’ — Richard Wollheim

Art in its entirety is as elusive as a fully satisfying description of the idea of God. For me, it is so elusive that I have stopped trying to wrap my head around what constitutes art, what doesn’t, or why it is.

In a utopian attempt to give it a personal meaning, I may describe art as the place where anything could be. Parmenides (who is stuck in my head thanks to philosophy-historian Massimo Pulpito) used to argue that only things that are are. Anything that is not, is not because it can’t be. Everything is. Now, while this may be confusing — especially as described by yours truly — for me art represents just this: the place where anything that could be finds a way of being.

Sure, I am no philosopher. But many thinkers have given very good descriptions of what art is, or what it signifies.

‘The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance’ — Aristotle

Hegel and Heidegger might facilitate my transition from questioning to listing — BTW, if you’d like for me to…