Many people often say that they can’t understand art thing, especially many contemporary arts in exhibitions by independent galleries, where are not only full with exotics but also weird visual imagery with sensory stimuli. Why they are so different from whatever in “normal” things?
First we have to define what is the normal. Second we have to understand there are many genres of art, most of which are related to the ideological, spiritual ，aesthetic and technological issues. In face it is not difficult to interpret a specific art once getting into the culture context that belongs to that art. This is a big world with multi-culture and co-ex stance system.
Some might think what’s the hack to know such things, nothing to do with real life? Is it concerned to any daily work or business development? What the benefit to know more about arts?
In fact, art comes from culture in the shape of all means to express aesthetic experience. People of different cultural backgrounds, social classes and tastes have different preferences in art language. So understanding art has a lot to do with modern life, especial in cross-culture communication. As for the reason, let’s find them out together gradually!
So what is culture? There are various explanations about this issue. I will adopt a broad and simple explanation, that is, everything created by human beings on the earth, material or non-material, can be classified as culture. That is to say, during the development of civilization, all stuffs such as folklore, customs, thoughts, etc. are all part of the overall culture. Therefore, the reason why someone can’t understand an art is that it’s not within his culture scope. Of course, we can’t rule out some opportunists who are sneaking around and taking advantage of the misunderstanding. It should be a happiness to learn art stuffs for life. That is a way to enrich and enlarge living stage.
Taking oriental continent for example, in ancient time, due to the limitation and regional barriers, there were great culture diversity around this world resulting in various ethnics. Culture exchanged by means of migration, commerce, warfare and marriage. The culture development of closed region was controlled by a powerful regime, forming dominated culture and subculture. Those culture from folks were somehow different to main stream or the official one.Grass-roots culture express factions that may opposite to political one. All the facts survives in arts. For example, the cultural representation of China changed after the turnover of dynasties, such as Qi, Han, Tang or Song, etc. Now, if China takes the Han culture of the Central Plains as its starting point, it’s not hard to find that the Tang culture came from the western regions, the Song came from central region, the Yuan came from desert, the Ming comes from south migration and the Qing came from northeast. Therefore we can pull out derivative factors that affect modern China. People in business can deal with and tell the culture different by viewing good artifacts of contemporary art.
When having a chance to watch contemporary art exhibitions, you can try to extract a general idea of what all about in a dominant culture and subculture. Therefor the best way to understand a whole country is through artworks from artists within that culture. It is also a good approach to do business with people of different culture background. That is a significant value in a diversified world. You can make sure you are dealing a business with humans not a robot. The real art is always form humans hands with skills and aesthetics, no matter presented in what kind of form..
Being a good collector of any art form is a privilege to put together culture phenomenon in humans history, a goodies that not measured by price but by value.That is a asset that money can not buy!
Do you want to learn more about arts that may benefit your life? Especially in the dawn of new civilization and the chaos of Great Reset and New Normal, the art is vital to level turbulence. Please join and be our member.
