How to Enter the World of Art

By Mark Doren

If we create art, we do so to communicate with ourselves and with others. If we acquire art, we do so to communicate with ourselves and others. Art has always been about communication. We know with great certainty that the physical world is temporary.

Castles crumble, land masses shift, and the planets themselves appear and disappear—it's all temporary. Perhaps what’s eternal are our emotions, our thoughts, and our experiences. Tolstoy wrote that art cannot exist for its own sake and that its value is weighed only in relation to its servicing mankind. In a word, he too was speaking of communication.

Let Emotions Guide You
Through literature, music, and the visual arts, we bring forth the human condition. We are spirits fed by our emotions. Musicians communicate through their instruments, writers, their pens, and painters their colors. Each artist is attempting to create a synthesizer from which emotions once experienced can be felt again and perhaps shared with others. The artist is successful only when they have created a vehicle from which the spirit of their pursuit is conveyed.

Art brings nothing new to the senses; it only rekindles emotions that we have felt before. If successful, art catalyzes our emotions, reminding us of what we have felt and who we are. It is the record of human experience. The artist's rendering is left only as sweet sentiment and exemplary craft, should it not touch upon your soul.

Life Found in All Art
The beauty of life or its tragic fringes can be expressed in a traditional landscape or an abstract work consisting of one powerful splash of color. The artists give evidence of their lives, and the viewer embraces and shares this experience, it becomes a part of them. Should you ever come across such a work of art, it will have a life stirring within it, and it will be yours.

Mark Doren, the director of Michigan-based Gallerie 454 Group, works with many physician art collectors. He has many important works to his credit, has participated as expert testimony in numerous litigations, and lectures extensively on art and art-related subjects here and abroad.