I remember visiting my best friend’s grandpa in Hospice. As I roamed the hospital floor, I noticed dark beige walls, cold sterile floors, paintings and portraits made of dark greens, reds, and browns. I turned to my friend and nearly spat out, “ This place is so depressing! Why would anyone ever design the hospice section of the hospital like this?” She giggled and blew it off as if what I had just said was a negligible thought.

A week passed and we visited her grandpa again. When I looked up at the wall directly across from her grandpa’s bed, I couldn’t help but notice that the painting of the two black falling birds once hanging on the wall was now turned, facing the wall on the floor, so that not a soul could see it. In its place hung a bright abstract oil painting with hot red, fuchsia pink, and sunset orange streaks and squares filled that the painting. I couldn’t help but ask her grandpa, “Grandpa, what happened to the old painting?” Her grandma responded for her ill husband, “He said it made him feel sad and he didn’t want to have to look at it everyday.”

Art is the relation of feelings from one individual to another. How well can an artist express himself so that not only does he deliver his message, but also that the audience receives it full force? Does the artist allow for his audience to see his agony or joy, or does he instead allow them to feel it? A true artist can leave a mark on the art connoisseur, as well as on the man who has never taken a day of any sort of art class in his life whether it is band, chorus, painting, drawing, etc. The audience, no matter how inept or proficient in their knowledge of art, should be moved with or without understanding as to why.

Museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum, display several arrays of art. Tourists and locals the same, all come to gawk at the beautiful art. But what makes the art beautiful is not the fact that the audience finds it beautiful of their own taste, but instead that the people who run the museum decided it was “good enough” to have its own display case. Museums with big money and names decide whose art is good enough to be adored by the public eye. From there, the name and artwork can only grow in popularity. How else would famous artists such as Da Vinci and Michelangelo become so recognized and used as standards for what makes art beautiful today? They were supported by big money and names such as the Church, the Royal Crown, and the Medici Family. Whatever “refined taste” the rich had for art and artists, is what became known as the greatest masterpieces and artists to exist. Had the rich back then enjoyed a different type of art, who then would be “one of the greatest artists of all time, a man whose name has become synonymous with the word ‘masterpiece.’”¹ 

P.S. Have you heard of any of these female artists from the Renaissance?²

¹http://www.michelangelo.com/buon/bio-index2.html

²http://www.artcyclopedia.com/hot/women-artists-of-the-renaissance-1.html