There is a veneer of elitism surrounding the art world, including the cliche idea that one must be “in-the-know” in order to truly appreciate artwork. Art deals with multiple universes in which no two apples or carburetors look alike. To put it simply, in the worlds of art, subjective responses can bleed into the objective state of things, creating different perspectives from people to works, from works to people. 

 

1. Slow Art 

If you are a casual visitor, you can try “slow art” which is a way to look at art for a little longer and spend some quality moments with the work presented in front of you.  Not only can we evoke more stories and feelings about the works, but we are also offered a setting that is opposed to a rapid, flitting witnessing of art in modern societies that are characterised by extensive and continuous change. When you are doing slow art, time becomes a fleeting and contingent concept. 

 

You may then begin to contemplate the artwork and find delight in each of its details, including its forms, textures, colours, sizes, medium, etc - 

• Is it a painting, sculpture, or graphic work?

• Is the painting Oil, Acrylic, Ink, Charcoal, Watercolour or Collage?

• Is the colour bright or subdued?

• Does this artist apply the same tone or texture in another piece of work (in the same series)? 

• What is the most initial and genuine feeling when you look at the work? 

 

Whenever you take the time to examine a piece of art, you will notice that some will grab your emotions. And even if you feel nothing, the time you have with a particular art is a luxury, because you are investing spiritual and aesthetic capitals in yourself.  

​

2. Making Meanings

 “I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.”

 — Vincent Van Gogh

 

A traditional way of finding out the artist’s intended meanings and interpretation is to take note of the purposive structure of the work that can be discerned by close inspection of the artist’s composition, memory, life experiences, history and culture. 

 

If you do not want to place too much emphasis on originality, you can make your own meaning with the use of understanding the semiotics, which operates under the theory that an image can only be understood from the viewer’s perspective. Your interpretation can be supplanted by the presence of the artist, including his or her history or style, as the purveyor of meaning, to the extent that an interpretation is considered valid regardless of whether the artist had intended it. To take a step further, you can attempt to examine the work of a particular artist or movement to a collective consciousness. In a Saussurean way of thinking, differential meaning of signs (artwork) can be read within a system. Rather than looking at a particular piece, constructing an amalgamated version that incorporates a singular piece into a similar collection can offer alternate possibilities such as a profile, or a three-quarter view.

 

For example, if you look only at Giorgio de Chirico’s work, the immediately recognisable effect is the very enigmatic cityscapes and modern twists that are difficult to interpret somehow. His work bears a striking visual resemblance to that of artists like René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, giving us something more about his vision to blur the edges between reality and fantasy and the difference that he intended for a world rooted in the philosophy of metaphysics out of a state of reverie. Note that the “unlimited semiosis” is endless; you are able to reveal more and more possibilities within a work.

​

You Are What You See

The detachment of art from a political, historical, religious and comparative framework (mainly associated with the artist) is a precondition not only for the emergence and development for a deconstructivist means for appreciating art, but also for the distinctly modern preoccupation with works of art as mere autonomous aesthetic objects. French literary critics, Roland Barthes, wrote in his essay “The Death of the Author” in 1967:

Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

 

Instead of tyrannically centering on the creator (the artist in this case), we can be freed by enabling the inability of originality that the readers/viewers are the space on which all the quotations that make up a piece of art are inscribed without any of them being lost. In other words, a work of art is a space of many dimensions that viewers can have multiple discoveries.  Viewers can also explore the work at their own times. Sometimes, viewers can become more engaged by revisiting a previous work. Magritte, for instance, imagined what some famous paintings would look like at the time he painted.