/lit/ - Literature

I think that if you don’t understand why people enjoy art, you probably shouldn’t be here, and if you aren’t still underage when you have this lack of understanding you’re never going to understand it anyway.

>>20141404

Art allows the expression of thought and feeling in a way that flows most naturally to us. It is an interpretation and expression of the world as one person (the artist) sees it, thus it can expose us to new perspectives and contexts, that’s why some art is created in order to challenge its audience’s ideas, some can do that without trying to. It can also be entertaining, but with the more lauded art writing (“literature”) that you seem to ask about it’s the expression of experience and ideas, along with the specific emotions of the artist that draws people to it. Moby-Dick isn’t really any more entertaining than The Count of Monte Cristo, but the former is a more interesting expression of the author’s experience of the world, how his life has shaped the way he relates ideas and emotions, in a shift of context to the artist’s perspective we might understand something we didn’t know before, or reinterpret something we already thought we knew. Some people do read (or usually start reading in their young adulthood) literature in order to affect the appearance of an “intellectual”, but usually they will either give it up because they don’t appreciate it and they are bored, or even though they began reading out of a cynical desire to be “interesting”, they will come to appreciate the art they are exposing themselves to as moments of profound insight and aesthetic sublimity reach them and affect the way they think about themselves and the universe.
Anon, why are you, someone who doesn’t understand the appreciation of artistic beauty on the literature board?

Picrelated should get posted more often here

>>20100370