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Some months ago, I went to Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The purpose of the trip was to visit as many museums and art exhibitions as I could fit in the span of six hours – I managed to visit a couple of museums, four exhibitions, and the Helsinki Observatory. It was great fun, but I wouldn’t bother writing about it if it weren’t for one serendipitous realization, one related to the true nature of art, that can be summed up this way:

• Art hides in the most unexpected places.
• You need to be able to see art.

All this might sound a bit cryptic. Moreover, referring to “the true nature of art” makes me feel uncomfortable – who am I to define something so undefinable? For all purposes, this text is somewhat stream-of-consciousness, drawing on the way I experienced some things. It’s subjective; there’s nothing but subjectivity.

Still, whether you’re a creator of art (a writer, a painter, a musician, or even – why not? – a coder) or “just” a reader/viewer, this might reveal new horizons to the ways you understand the “true” nature of art.

The “True” Nature of Art: Disrupting and Redefining

Art is a notoriously difficult concept to define, because it means different things to different people. The way I approach it, art is certainly not synonymous to entertainment (so, no, Fantastic Four is not art; it’s mere entertainment, and perhaps some other things). 

In my view, art has two important components; two requirements, to qualify as art:

• The ability to inspire affect. 
• The potential to be disruptive.

We’ve talked a lot about the former, and it’s self-explanatory, so I’ll be brief: True art needs to make you feel something. A novel is not about “what happened” (as many people think), but about “how it feels” – the way an artistic photograph doesn’t show you “reality”.

But what do we mean by being disruptive?

In a nutshell, I’d argue that true art must be able to help us redefine the world. Works that keep perpetuating the same flawed social patterns, the same flawed norms, the same flawed (and ultimately boring) ideas cannot be considered truly artistic.

Art should make you feel uncomfortable, it should be contradicting, and it should make you question.

What Happened in Helsinki

That sounds dramatic, I know… Nothing happened. That is, nothing artistic happened in most places I visited (the sole exception is what makes all this interesting; bear with me).

One of the exhibitions I visited contained some classic paintings – mostly by 16th-17th century Dutch painters. They were “nice”, perhaps historically important, and some of them could still inspire affective responses (more due to technique than themes). 

The rest of the exhibitions contained modern art, and allow me to put it bluntly: They mostly sucked. No or little aesthetic value, and utterly devoid of either affective potential or the ability to disrupt.

Most of the modern art that reaches us – and here I remember Banksy, talking about exhibition visitors being tourists seeing the trophies of the rich – is made by creators in the people-pleasing business, and so by definition can’t disrupt.

More insidiously, most of modern art presents a faux disruption; the aestheticization of disruption, that deals with the shocking and bizarre, while cunningly refraining from naming the causes.

No wonder I have a whole series of cartoons in Punning Walrus dealing with modern art. Just the fact the arctic modern art museum is run by the local penguin mobster should give you a hint about my opinion regarding (most) modern art:

The True Nature of Art Is Both “Out There” and “In Here”

And now, let’s get to the pinnacle of my Helsinki visit; the most revealing moment, the most authentically artistic thing I experienced.

You might be surprised to hear that it happened in the Observatory. A place more like a museum, containing old telescopes and pendulums, and certainly not pretending to offer art.

The “work of art” that inspired such strong emotions in me was a cloud chamber. A cloud chamber is a very simple device (possible to make one as a DIY project!) that detects cosmic radiation as it passes through Earth. The particles leave fuzzy, misty trails on the solution, a bit like white brushstrokes against a black canvas, that morph, move, and disappear, fading in and out endlessly. Here’s a video showing it in action:

Click to display the embedded YouTube video

Experiencing this felt really, really immense. I felt as if I was being talked to by the universe. I immediately thought of wind chimes and Eolian harps, and how the Romantics believed the wind used them to play the Earth’s songs. It’s related to the sublime, if not the numinous:

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversly framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

Samuel Coleridge; “Eolian Harp”, lines 44-48.

The cloud chamber patterns are random, and each instantiation of experience is probabilistically unique, in the entirety of the cosmos. So I, an insignificant nobody, on a nobody planet, in a nobody solar system, in a nobody galaxy, was offered these few seconds of cosmic dance. 

It made me feel small, yet privileged. Moreover, it reminded me that we need to question our perception of reality.

That’s art, right there!

What My Experience Tells Us about the True Nature of Art

Here’s what I mentioned earlier:

• Art must inspire an affective response
• Art must inspire you to question 

Here’s a third element:

• Art must inspire you to create the meaning, rather than “read” it.

In other words, the true nature of art is not where we look first. True art is in the instances of experience all of us individually have. What we call “art” (paintings, novels, songs) is only the medium that allows us to access the universal pool of experiences. A skillful artist is one who knows how to offer such a medium, letting you do the proper work: creating meaning.

Do we create art? Experience art? Share art?

More like, art creates us.