We often speak of art as something made, something external.
Maybe art isn’t the object itself, but what occurs when that object meets a mind, a memory, a mood. This post is a rotation of thoughts around a familiar term. An attempt to trace the flicker of meaning that arises when we say art, and to follow where that flicker leads.
We humans are subjective beings who are fundamentally separate, locked in our own heads, experiences, and perspectives.
Art awakens subjectivity.
It invites our subjectivity to rise, to respond, to wrestle.
And that response is never universal.
One person weeps, another shrugs.
Art is the crack in a glacier.
The fractal geometry of a tree struck by lightning.
When encountered, we awake with resonancy.
Art is a private, resonant reckoning.
Art allows someone’s interiority—their feelings, dreams, memories, breakings, and becomings—to leak into a medium.
Art gives shape to these complexities.
Art isn’t static. A painting seen at twenty is not the same when seen at fifty. Not because the paint changed, but because we did.
When art is shared, it becomes something else, too—an invitation, a bridge, a chance for resonance between two subjects.
And what passes through it isn’t our subjectivity—it’s the trembling echo of our subjectivity.
It becomes a tension between intention and interpretation—that art lives not just in the subject who perceives but also in the echo of the one who created it.
However, a perfect sculpture, carved by a fallen rock and left in a cave for millennia, only becomes art when it is encountered with a resonating subject.
Art is not what is created, but what is revealed in the encounter with a resonating subject.
Art exists only in your resonance with it.