L'art Pour L'art

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection. -Oscar Wilde

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. -Aristotle

Kant introduced one of the most powerful concepts of how we appreciate art; he said ¨art for arts sake¨ or L'art pour L'art in French and this phase is still very relevant today. The reason why I consider this to be important is because with this concept Kant wanted to free art from any meaning, from any context or anything that ties it down away from just its pure essence. Art has become an extremely complicated word today, is seems to be a place closed to outsiders and the logic of from which this world plays are far from making any sense. We often hear about certain work of art like Pollock or Basquiat going to unimaginable sale prices and the reason for this is still far from clear to me.

This strange behavior that art follows could be caused by the fact that in the last century, we have been trying to make of it a different currency, its exclusive and is often related to the higher levels of class in society but most collectors don’t really have a keen taste for it, thus increasing this values while separating art from what it really is. The problem is that art, different to any other of these currencies, doesn’t follow trends, its entirely empirical and emotional and all of its value its unsupported in a physical quantity like we see in Gold for example, art is based on speculation.

I would some day like to become an art trader of some sort, in the sense of a hobby that is. Its interesting to invest in new talent and to be rewarded for the support, its fun to seek art and to be part of such an exclusive world even if its just in such an insignificant way but its important that we remember that the true value of art has always been to represent the ideas of society that are other way impossible to express, to make ideas and concepts more ¨digestible¨ and as Kant said, for the sake of just being art and being appreciated, it shouldn’t be unaffordable and in the bare minimum, it should be appreciated as its part of our humanity.

...........Sometimes we just have to let art be art.