I was watching Mona Lisa Smile last night, there is a struggle between the rigid structure and a progressive teacher. The students, trained in art history, view art as a checklist. They measure greatness by technique, historical significance, and academic consensus.
But the teacher (Katherine), asks them to stop thinking and just look. This raises the same question we spiral into, Is art objective (a science) or subjective (a feeling)? I have written few pieces on how it is subjective, but diving into different perspective today.
The Objectivity
Let’s start with a question. Is a toddler’s drawing of a cat or my own oil pastel tulips (forgive me) worse than Van Gogh’s Starry Night?
Technically? Maybe. But emotionally? To a stranger, the toddler’s drawing is scratch marks. To the toddler’s mother that drawing might evoke a deeper emotional response than any Van Gogh ever could. The value of the art changes entirely based on who is looking at it.
Van Gogh isn’t objectively better. Van Gogh is just intersubjectively validated. Intersubjective means that millions of us have agreed that his work carries meaning. We have built a consensus. But consensus is not the same thing as objective truth. It’s just a shared opinion.
Where Philosophy meets Biology
If art is subjective, why do 99% of humans agree that a tulips are beautiful? Fine, let’s take rose as an example. I recently found myself debating the ghost of the philosopher George Berkeley. Berkeley famously argued that “to be is to be perceived.” He might argue that the rose is beautiful to all of us because we are all tuning into a universal broadcast (God/universe).
- Symmetry = health in nature.
- Vibrant Red = ripe fruit and survival to our primate brains
This universal beauty isn’t art. it’s instinct/programming/conditioning. Agreeing that a rose is pretty doesn’t make us art critics. It just makes us human. If an alien species evolved on a planet where red meant poison and symmetry meant predator, they would look at our rose and recoil in horror. The rose isn’t objectively beautiful. It’s only beautiful to us.
But what if I paint a burning rose? Or a decaying rose Or a black rose ?
- One viewer might see the burning rose as a symbol of passion.
- Another might see it as a symbol of destruction and climate change.
- A third might see it as liberation from tradition.
The rose hasn’t changed. The viewer has brought your own life, your own experiences, and your own hope to the canvas.
The Gap: Where Art Actually Lives
If there is no objective standard, does art lose its meaning? On the contrary. It gains it.
- The Encoding: The artist feels something (grief, rage, hope) and tries to lock that feeling into a physical object (paint, clay, sound).
- The Gap: The object sits there, silent.
- The Decoding: You, the viewer, look at the object. You unlock it using your own life keys of experiences, trauma, joy, culture and more.
Art lives in the gap. It lives in the space between what the artist intended and what you perceive. The artist provides the prompt; you provide the meaning.
Intersubjective Space
The burning rose works because of shared cultural knowledge.
- Rose = beauty/romance (cultural agreement, not biological fact)
- Fire = destruction/passion (agreed symbolism)
- Paint on canvas = Art (consensus that this deserves attention)
This is consensus reality. It’s not true because of physics; it’s true because we’re all telling the same story together. Art needs both the shared language (intersubjective) and your personal translation (subjective).
The Knowledge Paradox
Knowledge doesn’t make art objective, but it makes your subjectivity richer. If you look at a painting knowing nothing, you feel something. If you look at a painting knowing the history, the symbolism, and the artist’s life, you feel more.
The Art is Subjective. The emotional impact of the “why” is entirely up to the us. The artist can only create the bridge. They use their skills to encode an emotion into an object.
Katherine was right. You can learn everything about the paint, the canvas, and the date it was made. But until you decide how it makes you feel, you haven’t actually seen the art. You’ve only seen the object.
There is no single answer in art. There is only the artist’s intention and your interpretation and the art lives in the space between them.
Cheers
PS: Not sure if I made sense
Check out the previous post: Paradox of Growth and Stability
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