Art elicits a gamut of emotions in me, even by a single artist.

Som of Picasso’s lithographs fill me with a calm serene joy, other works of his are full of sensuality, while Guernica brings out both anger and tears, a feeling of outrage.

I have emotionally bonded with certain women over the shared experience of viewing certain paintings.

Yes. I was raised, educated, and friends with people who appreciated art and/or were artists, and I’ve taken art classes and spent many hours in first-rate art museums – it’s not something that’s an immediate natural capacity.

Sounds like you have a very limited range of experience appreciating art, which is sad to me.

Even mediocre art for me at least evokes the struggle for the artist with his medium, or my uncomfortable unwillingness to engage it. Most skilled fine art is something I can sit with for some time and experience a series of aesthetic and emotional impressions from it, thoughts and reflections about it, and so on. “Is it pretty?” is only occasionally one of those, and money almost never is.

You have to define art.

Art can be visual: paintings, sculpture, murals, photographs

Art can be music or audio of some sort

Art can be the written word: poetry, for example

Each of these imparts different things to me; I know what it says to me, even if others disagree.

So, yes – what you see or hear in the art may not be what the artist intended. But the beauty of art is that each of us can interpret in the way we wish.

Art is art. You may like it, you may not. It may do nothing for you. Such is art!

I read a simple definition of art once that has worked for me for many years since then: Art is quality of communication.

As simple as that.

Art can be found in painting and sculpture, certainly, in the way that those things can communicate moods, impressions, ideas, themes and conflicts in many (or few) brush strokes and colors, simple or complex lines and in physical objects, placement, size and attitude (for example). But art also exists in words; in spoken words and poetry, and even a well-created sentence (or book) in prose. Art certainly exists in music. It can also exist in the human form itself, to communicate concepts of health, skill in execution of athletic endeavors (or even simple perseverance), and the style with which things are accomplished or even attempted.

To reduce art to grades of “prettiness” does a great disservice to the ideas of art in the first place, and one’s own capability and depth of comprehension, beyond that.

There are some paintings, some music and some poems that resonate quite deeply within me. The gap of time and distance between me and the artist disappears and I feel something of what the artist felt at the moment of creation. An artist can conjure up feelings so subtle that you never thought it possible they could be expressed.