Defamiliarization

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but maybe they are worth far more than that. Pictures, although seemingly simple in nature, are extremely complex. Far too often, people overlook what a picture truly is. When a person looks at an image, they most likely see only the image, nothing else. Many people do not look deep enough into an image to fully comprehend the true meaning of it. However, when an individual begins to truly study an image in an attempt to understand the true complexity of it, they will be surprised at what they overlooked before. As stated by French Realist Painter, Gustave Courbet, “Fine art is knowledge made visible.”

According to Mandel, art reminds us that we’re human. It is a subconscious human instinct, even “in the midst of catastrophe” (Knopf).

In the passage “Two Ways of Seeing a River,” author Mark Twain attempts to share the feelings of loss he experienced after he was disillusioned to the beauty of the Mississippi River. Twain was a famous Nineteenth century author who had previously worked as a steamboat captain and who grew up along the river. The organization of the paragraphs in relation to each other is linear, and the content of each paragraph is dominated by a different rhetorical device.

| a celebration of the genius that enabled certain people to convey profound insights through art.

     Art, in each and every form that it comes in, shows us who we are. Our

“Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as

Philosopher Arthur Danto, author of “The Artworld,” an artistic criticism, states that “to see something as art requires something that the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” (201). Artistic theory, according to Danto, requires the presence of a subject, style, rhetorical ellipses, and that of historical context. Danto is capable of developing this view on art with the aid of an imaginary character, Testadura. Testadura, however, makes mistakes, as well as corrections, about the objects before him.

Art is an object or piece of work that brings one pleasure. Art is also something you see or feel and you cannot even begin to describe the ways you like it or how it makes you feel. Art is something that portrays beauty and happiness. Art lets you see the world through another person’s perspective. Most art seems to tell a story about where a person has been and the things they have encountered along the way. It lets you connect with the artist and see things through their eyes. Art is a way of expressing one’s self without words. When I think of art, I think of paintings, portraits, sketches, and sculptures.

that one is dreaming and that the dream is coming from the self. The notion that

“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”

The most important trait in defining art is its beauty. As complex as the term “art” can be, the term “beauty” is nearly just as complicated. In order to understand art more clearly it is important to understand beauty. “We label an object beautiful because it promotes an internal harmony or ‘free play’ of our mental faculties; we call something ‘beautiful’ when it elicits this pleasure.” (Freeland 8). As defined above, beauty is not a direct message. It is something that subconsciously allows man to feel good and pleasurable. There is “an internal harmony” when we observe something beautiful that allows us to take away a deeper understanding of a work of art regardless of it being “nice looking” or “ugly”.

Art is simple. Art is complex. Art is everything. Take a moment, everyday, to find art in the surrounding world. By doing this simple task, the understanding of art emerges. This

As onlookers peer into the artworks in front of them, there is no question as to whether or not they considered what the artwork means, where it came from and what the artist was interested in who created it. The

For over two thousand years, various philosophers have questioned the influence of art in our society. They have used abstract reasoning, human emotions, and logic to go beyond this world in the search for answers about arts' existence. For philosophers, art was not viewed for its own beauty, but rather for the question of how art and artists can help make our society more stable for the next generation. Plato, a Greek philosopher who lived during 420-348 B.C. in Athens, and Aristotle, Plato’s student who argued against his beliefs, have no exceptions to the steps they had to take in order to understand the purpose of art and artists. Though these two philosophers made marvelous discoveries about the existence of art, artists, and

“Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down. “- Francis Bacon. However when I learnt more about history of art and the way each movement and happenings in the world inspired artist to make new works, I was able to see much more than just a canvas with random paints and sketches. The interesting part about this concept is that each piece of art could be interpreted in many different ways. In contemporary art there isn’t right and wrong, each of us view and find different meanings and connections with artworks.