Ask HN: Has anyone learnt to love art?

I have had a similar "issue", I never understood what do people see in art and why it always seems so hyped up. But just by getting more mature, and exposing yourself to different things and people, your perspective changes. That is what happened to me. I've started to notice that my eyes were getting more and more attracted to visual things. Photographs, paintings, etc. I've started to notice more details, more things came into place, the reason behind some of the works I've seen.

It's just my personal experience. I liked the natural transition. And it's still happening. I think it will never end. But if you're naturally leaning towards it, don't rush it. It's art. You don't have to understand it to love it, but over time you'll love it even more as it reveals itself.

I find that good art is actually a way of crystallizing and capturing emotions of a period of time. Many of those emotions don't resonate with us as they were in some period of history unfamiliar with us.

Music tends to capture emotions much better. There's the anger in Eminem's music, the helplessness of Linkin Park, the depression of Nirvana, ambition and energy of Queen.

Art paintings and sculptures tends to target art viewers. It's not meant to just be beautiful but say something. Like memes, they much of it is a fresh take on a common thought of the period. But looking at it as an outsider, they're hard to get.

You might appreciate architecture more. There are things like animated sculptures or huge ones crafted from steel. Or things more subtle, playing with light.

Or if you want things that captures and enhances natural beauty, photography and food is a kind of art too.

But what I find to be the rawest kind of art is war memorials. The most memorable art experience for me was visiting war memorials in Canberra. You can also go to places like Holocaust museums.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b072n5xp

There's a bunch of stuff that we used to think was universal but we've relatively recently found out isn't. One example would be "forming mental images of things".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34039054

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894

Is there nothing at all that provokes any reaction? No film that triggers anything?

Wanna know what changed me a lot? Diverse friend circle, drugs and listening to Kanye West. Those things taught me to look at life in a different way, appreciate the emotion and experiences they capture or try to evoke. I love art now. I got a huge basquiat canvas on my wall (not an original ofc) and a bunch of paintings by artists that aren't remotely popular.

Go to a museum and take a guided tour where they talk about the artists. You should start to feel intellectual curiosity at the very least.

One of the books I read was "What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye", by Will Gompertz[0].

It's fantastic! The book is great at making you "get" art, and it's significance. Art is not so much about "emotion" as it is about showing and telling the same things in a different way. Or just doing something completely different!

[0]https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Are-You-Looking-At/dp/06709204...

Just two examples to make it clear:

High Art vs Low Art (kitsch):

https://www.documenta.de/en/retrospective/documenta_5

Going new Ways and influence Art (kurt schwitters):

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Schwitters#Influences

And two Sites, that can give you a good sart:

http://onlinekurs.staedelmuseum.de/en/

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning

Read John Berger' Way of Seeing.

There's also a thick nearly opaque wall of posturing involved, so that talking about art is often an anxious display of cultural capital.

Learning to love art, like learning to love wine, is heavily tied up with class and the attempt to "understand" the acquired tastes of the upper middle class.

Staring at paintings in exhibition rooms or museums is also a very unnatural thing for a human being to do. Great art from the past wasn't made to be "exhibited" like that, it was usually part of a context, from which it was later extracted, or literally stolen.

You can think of a painting in terms of "how would this subtle affect my mood if I hung it on the east wall of my living room?" That's a function of art, too, and probably a more authentic and real one. A lot of art was made to hang in churches for inspiration, so if you're inspired by religion, that's a whole thing.

Maybe you'd like to try going to a museum of history and viewing some ancient everyday tools, coins, and jewelry. Those are things that were carried around by people or kept in their homes, and people wouldn't usually stand around staring at them and admiring them, so you're not experiencing them as they did, and there's no need to feel "emotion" in any romantic or dramatic sense... but those artifacts are still very interesting, beautiful, and provoking the imagination.

You can also be interested in paintings in this way. Go to an art museum, find a painting that seems interesting in some way, not necessarily because it overwhelms you with feelings, but maybe just because it seems odd, strange, or curious... Or you just don't understand it.

Then you can realize that a single painting, because it contains so much information in the whole tapestry of its context and history, is like a portal into another world that you can explore, if you want to... and that's kind of amazing.

I think the idea of a painting as a radiant artifact that makes people swoon with awe is pretty strange, and possibly only applies to people with a certain abnormal genetic kind of synaesthesia.

Van Gogh painted a lot of scenes from nature, because he loved nature, and walked a lot in the countryside. What I think is amazing about Van Gogh is that he paints those scenes not just as "beautiful" in a simple sense, but sometimes in a way that makes the landscape looks lonely, sad, or even distorted in a strangely vivid and almost scary way.

I doubt Van Gogh himself would say that his paintings "lived up" to the lived experience of being in the countryside during a sunset, say. But they mirror it in an interesting way, and having seen those paintings, one can see the countryside in a somewhat different way, or with more complex resonances.

His letters are fascinating to read. Some quotes:

“What I want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn’t anything sentimental or melancholy, but deep anguish. In short, I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly.”

“Many a worker in a factory or shop has had a strange, beautiful and pious youth. But city life sometimes removes ‘the early dew of the morning.’ Even so, the longing for ‘the old, old story’ remains. What is at the bottom of the heart stays at the bottom of the heart.”

“What am I in the eyes of most people – a nonentity or an eccentric or an obnoxious person – someone who has no position in society and never will have, in short the lowest o...