There are many perspectives of art and what it makes people feel. Art is subjective, but is all art appreciated?
In the past year, TikTok videos gained traction of tourists lined up in the Louvre, waiting to take a picture of the Mona Lisa. The Salle des États, the room occupying the Mona Lisa, has 11 other historic paintings, yet many tourists bypass them.
Getty Museum researchers discovered that people on average spend less than 30 seconds in front a piece of artwork, before moving to the next.
Photo via Kunstloft.
The Mona Lisa is known as Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting, and the world’s most known artwork. The 1503 creation traveled with da Vinci until his death in 1519. In 1804, the Mona Lisa was placed in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, to then be stolen in 1911. The artwork’s location was discovered in 1913 and returned to the Louvre in 1914.
While tourists may know the history of the Mona Lisa, its fame is continued through movies, books, songs, and memes.
“We’ve seen the Mona Lisa a billion different times,” Kane Nicholson said. “Usually in film and media, when you see like the destruction of Earth, you see these iconic portraits and paintings and statues.”
The Mona Lisa has become is an iconic piece of art history. There are many other historical artworks at are overlooked. Leonardo da Vinci’s other works even go unnoticed compared to the Mona Lisa, The Virgin of the Rocks for example.
The term “Aura” is described as arts “presence in time and space” and that the reproduction of a work of art can lack that aura by German Philosopher, Walter Benjamin in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
The original piece of a work of art can give people that sense of “aura” and draw them to digest it more.
In the modern age, art can lose its “aura”, the impact that art can give is still there, though it may not come across as often with how art is constantly being reproduced. AI is a prime example of that.
Nicholson is a concept artist. When AI was first gaining traction online, him and his friends put their artwork into AI to see what would happen to it. They later found out that AI uses pieces of everyone’s artwork to make creations, and they had just given it everything they need.
“I was looking at a reel on social media, this artist was talking about how she found some paintings on Hobby Lobby,” Art history Professor Mariana Gómez Fosado said. “With these AI generated content, it was like this rooster. In close inspection, the rooster had like weird lengths, or he was missing a toe or a claw.”
The career of an artist has evolved since the renaissance era. In the modern age there is an increase in competition as well as an increase in education. DSC has the Studio Arts program which give students the ability to learn and perfect their craft.
Many artists have moved to the app Cara instead of Instagram, which was the main outlet for artists previously, to post and discuss all things art.
A way to appreciate and discover art is Google Arts & Culture. This site was created to preserve art and culture to be accessible to all people in the world.
Art is appreciated through art historians and the artist themselves. They are the ones who show the world art, through social media, museums, galleries, and festivals. In the modern age there is a hustle for artists to constantly create. With the use of media and AI these art pieces can lose its meaning to the public eye and may just be looked at for 30 seconds before moving to the next.