The Question of “What Is Art?” Essay Example

The question of “what is art?” is a question that is never fundamentally answered in art itself, but instead it this question that shapes and informs art. In other words, art constantly challenges its own definitions as to what it exactly is. J.M.W. Turner seems to allude to such a definition of art with his statement: “I don’t paint so that people will understand me, I paint to show what a particular scene looks like.” In the first half of the remark, we get a sense that what art is about, according to Turner, is a challenging of preconceptions, a challenging of understanding. Turner’s aim with his art is not some type of mutual comprehension between the painter and the work of art. Turner, in other words, is not interested in the audience some how grasping what he himself wants to communicate. Instead, as he states, he wants to present an image to the audience. Hence, Turner does in fact wish to communicate to the audience, but not through the framework of the spectator-artist relationship, but rather by communicating the force of a scene to the spectator.

Such a thesis becomes apparent when we take a closer look at a work of Turner’s such as Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway. (1844) The title of the image clarifies the subject matter: but what we are looking at in the work of art is not a clear depiction of this image of a train, but rather an almost abstract work of art. Linking the image of the painting itself to Turner’s quote, it appears that Turner is primarily trying to communicate “what a scene looks like”, not by some physical reconstruction of the object according to our preconceptions of what a train looks like, but rather instead capture images of the scene, such as the force and power of the train. In Turner’s work, it is this power of the train that is above all captured, almost destroying its immediate surroundings with its velocity.

Turner’s work in this sense, although it is a painting, is not bound to the visual aspects of painting. At the same time, however, Turner wants to depict, in his words, what a scene looks like. For Turner, therefore, what something looks like goes beyond what it looks like in some intuitively descriptive sense, i.e., the visual aspects of the image. What something looks like can also carry with it an idea of force and power: what something looks like can also be what something, for example, sounds like in Turner’s viewpoint, such that in the painting we see the train obliterating its landscape in a rush of speed. Turner wants to communicate a wealth of ideas, concepts and physical sensations in his work and this is why it seems so abstract: what something looks like in relation to these concepts is not something ultimately simple.

How does this tie in to the initial notion of art constantly challenging its own definition, its own limitations? Arguably, this is Turner’s goal in this painting. Painting is not limited to merely the representation of the chosen subject of the piece of art. It is not even limited to purely visual phenomena. This overload of ideas, concepts, physical sensations, as mentioned, forces us to re-thinking what painting itself aims to accomplish: Turner, in his own words, does not want to be understood as an artist, but instead wants a new form of communication, a form of communication that is accomplished through the traditional medium of painting, but at the same time challenges the presuppositions about the limits of this same medium. By taking such an approach, Turner does not therefore want to let us into his world, of what he thinks, but instead wants to challenge us through his work to think of our own possibilities of what art can accomplish.