Something about art

Something happened with my relationship with art in the last year.



It started with an excerpt from Kafka on the Shore: "I found those chords in an old room, very far away. The door to the room was open then."



Then came a Chopin piece that sounded of equal parts play and trepidation and warmth and opportunity. I found myself wondering where he had found the music within him to express these sentiments.



Next was a piece from Centre Pompidou in Paris called Reciprocal Accords by a Russian fellow named Kandinsky.



Tying these together is a quote from Tolstoy [1] about what art is:



To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling — this is the activity of art.



If art is something that evokes a feeling through some medium, then a lot of things would be considered art. A technology product, for instance. A notebook. An event. A company.



Open question: why does knowing the person or circumstances that produced the art change our experience of it? Why is a Jackson Pollock valued so much more than a fifth grader's painting?





[1] From here