Picasso wouldn’t be the only artist who has bemoaned the addictive need for audiences to look for meaning in a painting. It has become the be-all and end-all of appreciation or at least the first port of call for audiences to not only look but to believe that it is a given that there is something beneath the paint layers that requires deconstruction. There is an odd dichotomy at work here. In selecting a colour for your lounge room wall the choice comes down to emotion at one level and design at another. Everyone has this built-in sensibility and while interior decorating choices might delight and appal, the colour of the walls at least provides some degree of comfort/aesthetic pleasure/completeness to the person who chose the colour. Such a person feels no need to elucidate reasons for the choice. Even choosing a painting to go on the wall as decoration comes down to the same innate sense of rightness and may be no more than a liking for the colours. Asking what the wall colour means is not something productive and researching personal choice in terms of genetics or personal history is out of the question so why is there this dichotomy that says that art has to be treated differently? What is the real difference between what an artist paints on a canvas and the colour of the wall on which it hangs? The inevitable statement with art is ‘I don’t understand it’ followed by ‘what’s it supposed to mean?’ The answer lies in cultural history. We have been programmed into a way of thinking and a vocabulary that accompanies it where a one word summation is all that is necessary.

This all comes down to a culturally stunted view of art that derives from an era between the Renaissance and modernity. Certain artists used extensive symbolism. For such an approach to still be in play after a century of modern art though would seem to be absurd. We have had a century of art education in schools and millions of people visiting art galleries and travelling exhibitions. Accessibility to great art has never been more prevalent. It is therefore disappointing that ‘real art’ is still a picture of something in many people’s eyes. It is a viewpoint promulgated largely though ignorance. That ‘real art’ can be deconstructed into layers of meaning and therein lies its worth, is as fallacious. The question though is not so much why this view of art persists but how we get past this point. There doesn’t seem to be an answer that doesn’t involve re-education or at least an expanding of the vocabulary used in evaluation if evaluation is even to take place as opposed to an emotional response. It really doesn’t matter in one sense, as long as there is a response, but there is room for improvement.

Recently I put up one of my paintings on a social media site. Unlike many who do the same thing I wasn’t looking for acclamation or help. What interested me were the comments people felt either obliged or compelled to make. While some were acrimonious and judgemental in a way that suggested that the writer felt threatened by the work, it was the largely monosyllabic responses that were the most interesting as people sought to encapsulate their thoughts in one word. This though in itself may be an act of self-preservation as much an inability to express complex thought in other than cliché.  While one commentator described people who attempted to identify style as ‘Art Nazis’, the words used to evaluate my painting such as wild, brilliant, stupendous, fantastic, wow, and super all had suggested overtones of hyperbole but lacked an understanding of what the words actually mean or their root. For instance, ‘brilliant’ refers to a quality of light as in the classification of diamonds. When applied to a work of art is could mean just that – the colour or tone exudes light. It could be justifiably applied to some Impressionist paintings. But my work was none of these. I have to assume that some other meaning was being applied that had more to do with the idea and how it had been developed but I can’t be sure and I somehow doubt that asking the writer might elicit a response that isn’t simply another cliché.

‘Fantastic’ has the same root as fantasy although it assumed the meaning of essentially meaningless hyperbole some time ago and now lexicographers have to accept both meanings in that both have been in common usage for at least a year. ‘Wild’ had me mystified. In one sense, common usage has wild as uncontrolled. I would have thought that my painting was the epitome of control given the choices I had made. In another sense it could be taken as beyond reason when in a hyperbolic sense it probably means the exact opposite. Irony? I doubt it.

The French philosopher Derrida challenged the use of language to try and define a concept such as truth. While he wanted language to be transparent in meaning, the very use of words to define or describe was in one sense ‘self-defeating’. Words come loaded with cultural baggage and this in no less true of understanding the art of Western Tradition than of any other cultural base. He questioned the vantage point of the audience in trying to come to terms with what could be called an event or phenomenon – in this case a work of art. Standing outside of the artist’s conception and looking in, as is inevitable with any work of art hung on a wall, is always going to present difficulties no matter how attuned the audience might be. The words, thoughts and emotions used to evaluate a work of art must inevitably be coloured by personal history. To have everyone respond in one way or even in the way the artist intended would seem to be an improbable ask just as much as asking an audience to use words in the first place. If the meaning of brilliant, super, stupendous and fantastic are taken to be not just meaningless hyperbole but equivalents, then there is little hope of engendering an art vocabulary that has any meaning at all.

The Art Nazis among us who have major qualms about the definitions of Realist, Abstract, illustration, or even one that I heard recently ‘Intuitive’ Art, bandied about in contradiction of meaning accepted in art institutions such as the Tate Gallery, leave me to wonder if the depth of ignorance about the meanings of words will simply proliferate until common usage overtakes anything presented in a dictionary. Derrida may well be right. Using language may never be an acceptable way of defining anything and when the audience for a work of art is so poorly equipped in terms not only of language but in coming to terms with their own emotional of intellectual capacity to respond to a work of art without resorting to deconstruction of meaning and semiotics, then the every-increasing divide between artists and their public will only grow wider.