For me, art was always elegant, special and mysterious. If you want to explore the real meaning behind an art of work, you need to have money, time and also enough knowledge. It seems that not everyone can appreciate art. After reading some pieces of Ellen Dissanayake’s book “What is art for”, I decide to change my view for art and think about it in a totally different way. In the beginning, when Dissanayeke talks about art, I noticed that she uses an interesting word to expresse art. This word is “palaeoanthropsychobiological” (p 15). It means art actually have existed for a long time in our history and can include all cultures. Also, art is an expression of people’s emotion or psychology. After introducing this word, Dissanayeke states her views further and she says “My palaeoanthropsychobiogical view is that in order to include human history, human cultures, and human psychology, art must be viewed as an inherent universal (or biological) trait of the human species, as normal and natural as language, sex, sociability, aggression, or any of the other characteristics of human nature” (p 15). So art is not that far away from our life, actually it always stay with us. To prove her view, Dissanayeke then mentions the history of art from medieval times until now. In the medieval society, art was god-centered. As the society developed, people’s self-awareness had a dominate place and art became man-centered. After that, modernism arose and claimed that art is superior and only belongs to people who have leisure time and education. To oppose modernism, postmodernism became popular and stated that appreciating art can be everyone’s activity. Actually, these transforming and development just reflects that art making is a normal human behavior because people inherently like to make things special. The special creation can make people with the same perspective and values get together. Through art, they find the resonance and become more unite. So art can help them to survive during the hard times. Along with human history, it seems that art is a kind of people’s born ability and it is the sake for life. Just like Dissanayeke said “ If you are to carry one idea away from my talk I hope that it will be this : art is a normal and necessary behavior of human beings that like talking , exercising, playing, working, socializing, learning, loving and nurturing should be encouraged and developed in everyone” (p 26).
After reading your post, I somehow feel there is something challenging my original viewpoint –I believe that art is purely a pleasant moment which stimulates our internal mechanism to be “turn on”, rather than an abstract expressionism. However, your perspective – “the special creation can make people with the same perspective and values get together. Through art, they find the resonance and become more unite. So art can help them to survive during the hard times” (Han, 2014) – does make me to rethink my opinion. On one hand, art is an enjoyable experience, in which we are able to fire physical and/or psychological mechanism. On the other hand, art is not a pure relaxing process but a special creation. It is special because it has its strongest power of gathering people with shared tastes together; it has its strongest power of reuniting people; it has its strongest power of rescuing people in dark edge. Therefore, I would admit my original perspective to be oversimplified, and am willing to change it to be “art is not only a pleasant moment physically/psychologically but a strong power of special creation”. Also, I am glad to see we have shared ideas, in other word, the “agreement”. We both admit that “art is not that far away from our life, actually it always stays with us” (Han). Art is an ordinary thing, which all human beings have right to deserve, to enjoy and to appreciate.
I was having the same point of view as you did about art that art is a thing that normal people cannot get access to, but after reading Ellen Dissanayake’s book, we both changed our mind. In my opinion, art is unique but every one has the ability to access it. You think “art is an expression of people’s emotion or psychology'(Han,2014), which means art is a representing of people’s daily life, but in a special way. I agree that and I think art is connect to something more about “beauty”. I think art is a representing of a beautiful object and this object can be so different based on different people. Different people means people with different education level, living environment, or habits, etc. Everyone’s prefect art work can be so different since art is a really sensitive but this does not deny everyone has the right ability to learn and show what their art is.