The Nature of Art

I'm listening to some Beethoven right now, and it's kind of an awesome experience....I used to think of classical music as boring, adult music that should be studied and appreciated only as an important addition to our musical history.....you know, the stuff of old people in posh places where they talk about things of practical insignificance. That kind of approach to classical music utterly killed my enjoyment of it, until I was actually able to let go of my false assumptions regarding this genre of music and just take it as it is.

Thinking about this makes me wonder whether there are other things in art that we are unable to enjoy because perhaps we have unconsciously categorized them as something they are not. For example, we talked about how, at the beginning of the 20th century, artists such as Pablo Picasso changed the way art was portrayed by disfiguring people's features into very unnatural positions. This was bound to cause mass controversy, and why? Because of the same reason I was unable to enjoy classical music; they had categorized art into something it was not, something that was very opposed such a representation of people.

Art is much bigger, much more mysterious and powerful than the box in which we place it. I think that if we are able to approach it with a more open mind, we'll be able to enjoy it and learn from it a whole lot more than just going with the comfortable approach of placing it in the "art" category.