Emotional and sensory curiosity

I just finished reading Osborne, Sturgis and Turner’s excellent book Art Theory for Beginners (2006). It is an excellent work and which got me thinking and going. So after a quick digital art try-out (yes I know it’s a bit XXX, but what 'art' isn’t these days …?) here are my quick reference notes from the book:

• Is it “l‘art pour l’art” or does it and should it serve a higher purpose?
• Why is it that we humans spend time making, and spend time with things that to us are holy, beautiful or important? Doesn't it raise our sense of life (“lebensgefühl”) and make us feel better? Doesn't it make us feel more alive? It is lke the music we listen to and create, like the experience in the moments of intimacy and sublime presence ...
• Art is what moves us within (Diderot)
• The objective validity of aesthetic judgments, is the claim that the pleasure produced by any beautiful thing is such, that any being equipped with the perceptual and cognitive faculties of a human being, would experience this pleasure.  Thus it depends only on the general structure of the human mind. Aesthetic judgments can though not meet the rigorous standards for empirical knowledge (Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason)
• Art depicts the various stages of development the world’s spirit (Hegel)
• Art is constructive – the artist creates beauty, he does not merely reproduce it. It is made up of light, colours and shadows. (Goethe)
• Art Washes Away From The Soul the Dust of Everyday Life (Picasso)
• Beauty is a promise of happiness (Stendahl)
• Beauty is thruth (Earl of Shaftsbury)
• Art mirrors in an illusionary way how society sees itself (Marx)
• How surreal to be able to see the whole universe in but a weed, dada leaving us with nothing to help us though. High or low forms of art, or decorative qualities – what do I aspire to and want to spend time on? Beauty, function, cultural context and technical proficiency – it’s all down to emotional and sensory curiosity (Storm)
• “In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work.” (Heidegger)

So art is an experience, and a craft, an intellectual and emotional phenomena - all at the same time. It allows us to come closer to the truth of our existence … allowing me to deconstruct myself, my thoughts, my emotions, and my mind …

Quotes here are my own free ones, from memory of the text, and not double checked. The digital art piece, a photoshop study of erotica/sex, Pollock (who sees that link I wonder?) and Warhol.