Art, Artist and Audience

Each person has a different definition of art but what perhaps holds true for all people is the message. Art is a concentrated form of communication from one human being to another. Not a summary or a simile but a whole truth condensed into an essence.

The meaning of its message may vary, may change from person to person, or be almost incomprehensible. There was an art work I once saw in an arts festival consisted only of a pile of pale yellow pigment dust. It was clean, soft and pure and it held me spellbound for several minutes and its image stays with me for reasons I have no explanation for.

The music of Mozart, even heard in a tinny version coming from an elevator, immediately disconnects me from any conversation I am having and sends me to a place where only the music exists, engraved on my memory like a tattoo and making me feel divine.

The photographs of Cartier Bresson send me to places back in times before I was born, to people I never met and yet somehow know because of him. The paintings of Monet allow me to wander on hilltops overlooking seas I have never seen and in cultured gardens that are long gone as he knew them. The stories of Tolkein enable me to love little people and to want to fight monsters, to admire courage and understand honour, and to relate through the eyes of elves and ents to a holocaust similar to the one my parents fought against.

I saw a film many years ago based on a book called "The Singer Not The Song by Audrey Erskine Lindop". It's a story of a priest in Mexico who conflicts with a bandit leader who dominates the town. Neither deviate from their chosen course, but the fluctuation of their undeniable influence and manipulation of the towns people is a classic tale of good versus evil on which so many of our stories are based. It is also perhaps one of the first depictions of a serial killer but at the time gangsters and bandits were not called such.

And in the end there is a tiny connection, a gesture of respect that illuminates the title of the book. It is the human being that connects, but it is art that continues to send the message on when they are long dead. The artist, the message and the audience, that is what makes art what it is.

That story was about faith and choice, about ethics and where people draw the line, about urges and relationships and also about the place, time and religious climate of when the story is set. A novel can be art - the written word, a piece of culture, an examination of what it is to be human and how we all make choices on our interpretations of philosophy and how we incorporate these into our own lives.

All arts communicate something to us about the essence of nature, about ourselves, about the artist and what it is to be alive. Art tells its stories in books, or a movie or theatre, but also there are stories told in a song, a melody, a poem, a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, a piece of craft.

All art speaks. If it doesn't say exactly the same thing in the right language to each person, still it's meaning is often universally embraced. Art is the song. The artist is the singer. And the final irreplaceable member of the trinity is its audience.