Should Art Express Emotion?

By Randal Stevens

One of the most common misconceptions about art today is that the purpose of it is to express emotion. Despite what your teachers, some artist, a philosopher, or anyone else has told you, this is not the case. We can determine what the purpose of art is by looking at reality and history; what other people have said doesn't really matter.

Is it really so hard to believe that art wasn't created so that people could express how they feel at a certain time? Does it really seem important that someone be able to express that they feel sad through a painting? We have to assume that if art is about expressing emotion then it is the artist's emotion we are talking about, so why should I care how an artist felt while making a work of art? Or are artists just expressing random emotions from other people and other times?

The truth is that art is not such an arbitrary thing. Art expresses much more than emotions. After all, emotions come from somewhere; they come from our evaluations of situations and actions, and if you try to divorce emotion from any cause then it becomes meaningless. So to say that art is supposed to directly express emotion is to say that it expresses something meaningless and without reason.

Where people go wrong is thinking that a side effect of art is the purpose. Art should illicit emotion in the beholder, but it's a side effect, not the purpose. Art expresses judgments and evaluations of the artist, if it is art, and these in turn illicit emotions based on what the beholder thinks of those judgments.

This becomes clear when you look at the first works of art: cave paintings. Did the early humans draw pictures on the wall that expressed their emotions? Of course not, what would be the point of that? They didn't paint emotional abstractions, which modern artists always claim to be important. They painted things that were essential to them: animals and themselves hunting animals.

Being able to hunt and eat animals was everything in their world. Their lives depended on it. When they spent the time to paint animals on the wall it was because they were proclaiming them as important; they were judging and evaluating something. Animals were such an important part of their lives, such a constant fixture in their thought, that they were driven to express those ideas. They were not expressing their happiness or sadness; they were expressing their evaluations on what was important in life.

Modern art makes the mistake of holding emotion to be the purpose of art, and because of that you have artists splattering paint on a canvas and calling it art. It is a philosophical misunderstanding that should be corrected. Paint splatter does not express values or judgments, and can never be art. It can only be a pretentious waste, and we need to call it that. Art is too important to let people take over and turn into fashion. We need to reclaim art and tell the modern world that it's not just whatever they want it to be.