When Andrew told us that we were welcome to spend all day in the Louvre, he specifically called it, “one of the greatest treasure houses in the world”. Art is undeniably valuable, but the assignation of this value has been troubled throughout history and in the modern day. Fine arts, through the labor and expertise put into them, have a primary designated value. If the art piece means something to enough people or displays an exceptional level of talent, the piece then gains a secondary cultural value which is further reflected in monetary terms. This cultural value compounds as the piece’s fame grows in time until it becomes almost inconceivable what a piece would be “worth”. This is when a piece of art becomes “priceless”.
But much of the discourse I’ve seen from people who are “anti-art” and specifically “anti modern art” is a condemnation of this monetization. I have seen countless people refer to modern art as a money laundering scheme devoid of skill, and I refuse to believe that is true. Art is valuable because it holds beauty and because it allows us to share the experience of its splendor.
For me, literature holds a very similar kind of value. In class, we were talking about how reading Les Misérables made us feel, and when a certain touching moment was mentioned, I saw the room’s eyes light up in recognition, as we all recalled the feelings inspired by that scene. We had all lived in one moment, in different places and different times, and now we were being brought together in a special way by the simple act of recollection.
Art is a treasure, but it does more than gold or silver. Those contain external beauty, the beauty of the natural world. But a piece of art contains a glimpse of the beauty of the human soul.
This power struck me profoundly when I saw the statues of the Ancient Greeks and Romans at the Louvre. There was something inimitable, undeniable in them, which the neoclassicists of the 18th century couldn’t replicate. The Victory of Samothrace and the Venus of Milo, standing proudly dismembered, brought me that sense of wonder and connection with the ancient world that less immediate things like historical accounts and even the poems and plays could not. When I say that an Ancient Greek statue feels eternal, I don’t mean it in the literal sense, because of course some day it won’t be there, but it does feel symbolic of some deeper human eternity. The interior infinite that Hugo extols so highly is somewhere deep inside of us, and the further we march in space and time from the most profound expressions of that infinity, the greater the magnitude of its reflection.
When we got to the 19th century French painters, I saw the intersection of these two worlds as we matched the faces of the 19th century to our visions of the characters in Les Misérables and A Tale of Two Cities. This opened up a whole different way of interacting with art. I am already a visual reader, but suddenly these books came to life in a way they hadn’t before. Seeing period clothes and artifacts portrayed in every day scenes, as well as the painters’ ideas of what a quotidian drama would look like. There was a generative, combinatory effect of these artworks, almost moreso than of the prints directly inspired by the novel, which we saw in Victor Hugo’s house.
I believe that art should be studied, but more than anything I believe that it should be experienced, and one should open themselves as broadly and vulnerably as possible to hear what others have to express.