For me, art does express amazement at the world around us.
Every time I take a photo walk, I am impressed and amazed at how this world looks. Why was it created? Who or what did it? Was it an accident, failure, or a divine artistic genius? Are we the crucial part of it, even if there is only a void waiting for us outside the solar system? Is anthropic principle a key to understand the mystery of the Universe? Is it possible that there would be no Universe without us, humans? Thanks to art, I am often continually asking myself such questions. Without Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s and Stanislaw Lem’s writings or Zdzislaw Beksinski’s paintings, I would not probably ask so many questions to myself. Thanks to these questions, my earthly issues connected with, e.g., my health or money, seems not so crucial at all.
Broadly defined art expresses delight over the inevitable disproportion between human life and the infinite.
This disproportion we can measure, for example, in time. Comparing the average life span of a normal human being or even the lifetime of our whole human civilization to the age of Earth or the Universe is like comparing the size of an ant to the size of the Milky Way galaxy. For me, art expresses all this hard-to-understand and unimaginable awe to everything that surrounds all of us. That’s why I feel like a Martian every time I walk around Warsaw’s streets. Everything is interesting for me, whether a crow on the tree’s branch or an old rag lying on the ground for months.
Last but not least, art expresses an artist’s mood and feelings to not only himself but to other people and their surroundings. I love to live. I hope to survive the next one hundred years. Moreover, I hope that art will be my companion until the end of my existence.
PS
I wrote this text on the 31st of May, 2021.
