3 Questions About Art Not Worth Asking, and 4 Worth Remembering

Art raises many questions. If, standing in front of a painting in an art gallery, you find yourself asking "What on earth...?", then the painting has done its job.

But for those who encounter art less often, the questions that most commonly arise lead to a dead end. Here they are:

1. Why is this art?

First of all, art is extremely diverse, much like film or music - from silent cinema to the most-watched Hollywood blockbusters, from classical music to rap. The possibilities are endless. The same is true of art.

Some of the artworks you see in galleries or museums are meant to depict what reality looks like. These are easier to understand. Take Claude Monet's "Water Lilies" as an example. But in more recent times, art has concerned itself with other things.

Expressionism is concerned with conveying inner emotional and psychological tension through color and brushwork. Abstract art creates color compositions that deliberately depict no real-world objects at all. Conceptual art values the idea above all, and the object itself is sometimes entirely unimportant. Minimalism concentrates on material.

Yet unlike popular films or music, art offers no context. What does this mean?

Whatever we try to understand, we need context. When we watch a Hollywood film, everything needed to understand the plot is provided within the film itself, through easily recognizable character types and familiar chains of events. If all you want is to eat popcorn and relax, that's fine - but in that case the meaning sits on the surface, leaving no room for other interpretations.

Now consider a more artistic film, such as David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive", which offers less context and whose meaning is less obvious, leaving room for your own interpretation. The director provides no straightforward answer.

Yes, this takes effort, much like a crossword or a sudoku - but that's exactly what makes it interesting!

2. What does it mean?

100 years ago, at the start of the 20th century, experimentally minded painters - whom we now regard as the avant-garde - became fired up with the idea of creating a new visual language. Until then, ever since the Renaissance, the language of image-making had meant "representation": a painting depicted a landscape, people, or a vase of flowers. Good art meant a realistically rendered object.

But once photography was invented in 1839, there was no longer any point in spending hours hunched over a canvas trying to achieve a realistic effect - the camera did that job faster and better.

From then on, avant-garde artists began depicting what cannot be seen: emotional and psychological states.

In "The Scream" (1893), Edvard Munch used expressive brushstrokes, a red sky and a screaming figure to try to convey the horror of a panic attack. Other avant-garde artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky, turned toward abstraction.

Abstractionists approached the making of a painting or sculpture much as they would music. Music depicts nothing; its form is entirely abstract. Abstract art tried to do the same thing through color and line.

Abstract art became widely popular in the mid-20th century and later cooled somewhat, but figurative art did not reclaim its place. The idea moved to the center of art. Carl Andre's sculpture "Equivalent VIII", made up of 120 bricks arranged in a rectangle, means exactly that - the bricks themselves, their materiality and physical substance. By arranging them within the gallery context, that is precisely what the artist meant to say.

3. A four-year-old could do the same thing.

Everyone knows Picasso's line: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." What Picasso meant was that the artistic tradition that had prevailed since the Renaissance relied on an easily learned formula. The "Mona Lisa", painted around 1503, could serve as an example here.

Once you learn perspective, shading and the other rules of the Renaissance, many people could paint the same thing.

Four hundred years after the Renaissance, these techniques had grown tiresome, and the avant-garde decided they had had enough of copying reality. But what could replace the old, tried-and-tested rules of the Renaissance?

Picasso began searching for new sources - signs from African tribal art appeared in his work. Others looked for new techniques in the drawings of the mentally ill, still others in children's drawings. If modern art looks as though it were drawn by a four-year-old, then that is exactly what the artist set out to do.

You can learn to draw a dog so that it looks like a shaggy, barking creature, but how else might you newly capture its "dogness"? That is a real challenge, requiring not just drawing skill but imagination.

With this very idea in mind, Russian artist Oleg Kulik lived naked for two weeks in 1997 in a kennel set up inside a New York gallery, letting himself be led around on a leash, barking and biting people.

That is, of course, an extreme case, but it reveals "dogness" far better than flat pencil lines on paper.

Four (better) ways to look at art

So which questions are worth asking when you encounter an artwork you don't understand at first glance? Australian art theorist Terry Smith recently proposed "Four Ways of Looking at Art" - four simple questions:

1. What do I see simply by looking at the work?

2. How was this work made?

3. When was it made? What was happening in art and history at the time?

4. Why did the artist make it? What did it mean to them, and what does it mean to us?

Each question opens up more and more context, helping you understand the work better.

So next time you see a pile of bricks, an unmade bed, or a painting that looks like a four-year-old's scribbles in a gallery, ask yourself these four questions. They will most likely raise even more questions of their own - but that is exactly what makes this kind of art so interesting.