Communicating in a World of Art
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Art, which we see now as one of the basic expressive powers of all human beings, has seemed to be immune to progress, at least in qualitative terms. The artistic expression of early Stone Age art seems to be equal to anything that has come since. But in the understanding of art there has been considerable progress in recent years. To critics and historians of some earlier periods art seemed to exist in a spiritual realm apart from the daily lives of the people who made it, purchased it, and enjoyed it. Art became something almost religious in that view. In current thought art may be about sacred things, but it is the product of cultural interactions of people living their normal lives.

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Although we live in a period when no part of the globe is more than a few hours away and the cultural barriers that separate nations and individuals are weakening more and more every day, still we find differences of language and tradition are obstacles to understanding. Art, which people value for the pure pleasure it brings is also a medium of communication, which can break through barriers and overcome obstacles.

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Reconsidering the relationship between the artist and the audience, we can see that the audience plays a more active and important role in art than has been thought.

Art is not the capricious invention of a few geniuses, but one of the most basic and ancient communication mediums of the human race. Just as people remain basically the same yet are constantly changing, so art has common threads through time and yet is always new.

The Art World
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We usually think of art as being something made by an artist, with no significant help from anyone else. In the literal sense we are correct because that is usually the contribution of the artist: to make the work.

The artist, the patron, the critic and the audience must all play their parts or the work slips away into that limbo of undelivered messages.

Audiences at musical events are conscious of themselves as an audience because they must all come together at one time, often pay admission, sit together and experience and react in unison. Performers, critics, and the audience themselves all rate the quality of the audience just as they do that of the performing artists. Sometimes we read that the audience was "sophisticated and enthusiastic," other times "ignorant and unworthy of the performers. " musical understanding can be greatly improved by study and experience. The same is obviously true of the visual arts.

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We expect artists to be highly trained, but we usually forget that it takes as much education to understand a message as it does to send it. Artists and their audiences are almost always closely matched.

The four roles - artist, patron, critic, and audience - are the most important of the varied roles that make up the art world. The term art world refers to "all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of a particular kind of art."

Most of the time the art world operates smoothly, and it is hard to distinguish the contributions of all the participants. But when things go wrong it is easier to analyze the parts. It is like your car: you don't think about the engine until you begin to hear strange noises.

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Anyone who believes that art is meaningless has a hard time explaining this controversy. Everyone involved was certain that they understood the art and that it meant something definite.

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Roles in the Art World

The artist
There is an old controversy: are artists born or made? Are artists those few individuals born with unusual gifts, or is art something that can be learned by anyone with sufficient motivation? According to the philosopher Suzanne Langer, "the average person has a little talent", it is genius, which is "the mark of the true artist". She continues:

Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956), one of the most respected American artists, was described by his teacher Thomas Hart Benton as having "little talent." But Benton continues,

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It is not the artist's education that counts most, but the inner drive to express ideas.

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The Audience
The audience for any particular kind of art can be divided into three: a general audience of people who have a normal interest in their own culture, a serious audience of people who enjoy reading about art and who go out of their way to see new work, and students and professionals in art. The student and professional group are most interested in innovation and will tolerate boredom and confusion in the art if they think something new may turn up. By their presence at exhibits and by talking about what they have seen, the student and professional audience, as well as the critics, pass the word to members of the serious audience that there is something to see. Eventually the general audience learns through newspaper and magazine articles and television interviews that an art style or an artist is becoming interesting or fashionable.

All there sectors of the audience together are absolutely indispensable to the existence of art. If a hostess gives a party and nobody comes, it isn't a party; we can say pretty much the same for art. The whole audience decides what is art and what is not, usually with surprising independence of the critics. The professional audience is usually first to accept new work as art, but if that opinion is not eventually accepted by the members of the serious and general audiences, the work disappears from view. We sometimes look back and say that the audience was wrong or made a mistake, but such a statement is almost meaningless since every group of people defines art for themselves.

This is what happens in all art that finds a place in history. The artist has an idea and carries it out, hoping to find a patron and an audience. Sometimes the idea originates with a patron, who seeks an artist to bring it into existence as a work of art. In that case the patron must grant the artist liberty to carry out the work in a personal style. Both the artist and the patron have to grant the critic freedom to analyze its historical significance, and all three concede that the audience will decide whether it is good art or not and what it really means.