Art and beauty

Art and visual beauty are two totally different stories. Throughout the art history, the function of art has changed. It starts to serve the religion and today, art is not presented only by the gorgeous paintings in the church. Compare to the paintings from the period of Renaissance, modern art has extricated from the standard of beauty and more focuses on exploring and expressing the ideas that behind the artwork itself.

People are easily confused by the modern art and contemporary art when walking in the gallery. Some of them are not beautiful, nor understandable. How dare they call those things “art”? In 1917, Marcel Duchamp brought a urinal and signed “R. Mutt” on it, and there we go, one of the greatest artwork of modern art is created. People call it art, but what exactly is art? To me art is a way to speak freely and break the boundary. Art can be beautiful; on the other hand, it can also be as odd as it can be. In Duchamp’s work Fountain, he has created a new thought for that object, which emphasizes the value of an artwork is more important than how it looks. Duchamp challenges the restriction that art must be delicate and beautiful. After the technology of photograph invented, the realistic art has lost its function. Since then art serves personal, physical and social functions that no longer trapped by beauty. American painting Mark Rothko is a good example. His works mostly formed by simple color lumps. However, he was insistent that his art was filled with connect, and brimming with ideas. Standing in front of his painting, I can strongly feel the emotion that Rothko wanted to express through the painting – tragedy, ecstasy, doom. They were so powerful that I was even hard to breathe.

To sum up, art shows the artist’s feeling and thinking, no matter it is pretty or not.