What is
art for?

Life throws new experiences at us all the time. We are bombarded with new sights and sounds that we have to absorb to stay sane.

Artists are also trying to make sense of our world. They do it by making images. They force us to look again at what we didn't notice or what we thought was unimportant. They are our visual investigators.

Making sense of the present

They are not here to replicate the images or artefacts of the past. Like us, they are trying to make sense of the present and, in doing so, point to the future. They can do it because they look at things differently from us.

We might think we need to have a special language to talk about art in order to show that we understand it. This is not true. The language we use is a visual language, the one we use unthinkingly every day.

Creating the unexpected

But when we ask artists to create something they will always surprise us, because artists are many visual steps ahead of us. That's why artists so often create something wholly unexpected, making us jump or even shocked. We might have a preconceived image in our mind's eye when we talk about art, but they will always see things differently.

And while our initial shock changes into a new way of seeing something (or just fascination or curiosity), we realise that the artist is working on behalf of our creativity too. It just takes time for us to work out what they're seeing and saying. We have to catch up.

New ways of seeing

That's why brilliant art is often hated at first. There are many examples of good art which has first caused outrage and then been accepted – even loved. Often, the more abstract the art is, the more it is eventually enjoyed, because abstract art can mean lots of things to lots of people.

Antony Gormley's Angel of the North was originally attacked and derided from all sides. Now it is loved by the people who first hated it – and many would like to copy it. It just took time for us to see what Antony Gormley saw. And then it took some more time for us to see what it meant for us, and how dull the world would be if we understood everything the minute we saw it.

We all have the innate creative ability that artists have. We question everything just like they do. But they spend their lives perfecting ways of seeing our world and telling it back to us so that we understand and experience it in ways we hadn't thought of before.

Isabel Vasseur, curator for the Big Art project

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