«Der Erschöpfte Mann», the prominent art exhibition in the Zurich Landesmuseum, a breakdown of masculinity and social norms over the years. Our class had visited this exhibition before the Christmas break, having received a practical experience on how arts convey meaning and change throughout the years. In this lesson, the effect on us as the audience of the works shown at that exhibition were discussed and evaluated. We came to many conclusions, leading us to critically question the role of art in our society. How can a message be conveyed? When art considered “good”? What even is art?

In this day, we would try to go on a course which would lead us to a more profound understanding of the nature and role of art. We started off by looking at 3 approaches to analysing art and a quote by none other than Oscar Wilde himself “All art is quite useless” aided us as a leading sentence. The three aspects, intention of the artist, quality of the work and response of the spectator, formed the fundamental triangle of analysing the meaning of art. What did the creator want to achieve? What is the context behind a certain piece of art? What audience is expected to respond, and in which way? We tried to answer these questions by looking at three theories about the purpose of art, being “art as imitation, or mimesis”, “art as communication” and “art as education”. Using these three purposes as broader categories, we can gain an understanding of how different forms of art arise – a parody being humorous for copying existing work, Banksy’s street art being insightful for its efficient communication of societal problems, etc.

To further indulge ourselves in the spirit of arts we commenced a practical demonstration of the methodology of art, said demonstration being composing a musical piece by using tools that were readily available to us and then inventing a notation to write the piece down to enable other students to perform a cover the original piece. The difficulties faced by us included misunderstanding of notation and a lack of “instruments”; these challenges unfolded the problems artists have to face to convey their views of the world given the existing conventions. This is where the concept of originality arises: a breakthrough is a piece of art which shows reality from a completely new perspective. However, coming back to the initial question of “what is art”, when is a new piece of art an original breakthrough and when is it a meaningless blob on a piece of paper? As an example for this controversy, the musical piece “tacet”, which contained no notes at all, showed us how expectations can be subverted and how art can be pushed to its limits.

In conclusion, this day brought us on a journey of artistic discovery that explored the various depths of art itself. It taught us critically assess the value of art, as well as its limits and it showed us that in the end, the importance of art is most certainly equal of that of natural sciences, since both present the nature of our and convey different messages, albeit through different lenses.