What comes to mind when you think about the word, “art”? Do you think of massive paintings housed in respected museums? Plays and musicals from Broadway or the West End? Or of the many songs you have in your phone? Within a world where art is everywhere, one might conclude that art today is rather highly respected. But do we actually appreciate it as much as we seem to?

Many would say that we do appreciate it, and not just superficially. And that’s true, at least for a certain part of the world’s population. After all, there are paintings that are considered so inherently valuable that they have their own security. Take the Mona Lisa for example. It has around six million people visiting it every year, and has extreme security measures protecting it. There’s a large glass case surrounding it, a cordon to keep visitors at a distance, and even two security guards next to it!
There are also other areas of art that receive similar appreciation. An example is the Phantom of the Opera. This musical has been played for twenty-eight years on the West End, and is still being performed! It has received much praise from critics around the world, and is the most financially secure musical of all time. It is considered a classic of the theatre world.
Wealthy art buyers are also proof that our society appreciates art. In a report titled “Profit or Pleasure? Exploring the Motivations Behind Treasure Trends”, based on two thousand rich people in seventeen different countries, only ten percent said that they bought art as investment, with seventy five percent saying they bought it for their own enjoyment (Basel). Buying art for one’s own enjoyment shows that one truly appreciates and respects it. If not, then it wouldn’t count as buying it for one’s own enjoyment. It would be an investment or just something to show off.
All the artists in the world could also serve as examples of people appreciating art. In a world where being an artist, without becoming a starving one, is rather difficult, it would only make sense to say that they truly believed in what they were doing. Art teacher Ms. Ren Min is an example. She believes that “art is necessary to improve a person’s soul”.

While the examples above may indicate a society that truly appreciates art, one could also show that society only appreciates art in the superficial sense, as in pretending to appreciate it in order to impress others or pass oneself off as educated. As evidence, look at the article on Joshua Bell by the Washington Post. Joshua Bell, a Grammy-Award winning violinist who made it to Carnegie Hall at the age of seventeen, decided to play in a metro station on a cold January morning in 2007 (Weingarten). With his famed Stradivarius violin in hand, he played for forty-five minutes in front of around a thousand commuters (Weingarten). Only seven people actually stopped to listen (Weingarten). In short, he was pretty much ignored by the commuters, despite his amazing violin skills. Just three days before, he had filled Boston’s Symphony Hall, where mediocre seats went for $100 (Weingarten). But in a metro station, where his performance was equally as fantastic, he was ignored. If we really appreciate art as much as we say we do, shouldn’t there have been many people who stopped to listen? Shouldn’t there have been many people who recognized his talent? Or at least more than just one person out of a thousand? Shouldn’t his open violin case have received more than just thirty dollars, especially considering that he is a performer who can make a thousand dollars a minute in concert halls?
But actually, all performers in metro stations or on the street could serve as examples for this. Usually, these performers are above average. They might not be talented, but they are still enjoyable to listen to and watch. And yet they are passed every day by thousands of commuters, with only a few that bother to drop money into their instrument cases or stop to listen.
Then again, why is it that some appear to appreciate art if they do not actually like it? Perhaps it is conformity. “Conformity? What does that have anything to do with art?” you might say. Well, imagine a museum filled with the works of a prominent artist. You don’t like his work much, and you were just about to voice your opinion when you hear the couple next to you gushing about their interpretation of the meaning behind it and how perfect his brush strokes were. And then from behind you, you hear people talking about how beautiful they think the whole piece of art itself is. Would you still say that it was horrible? Not likely. You’d probably change your opinion and agree with the others, since it would elevate you in the eyes of the other people. It’s like the Asch Conformity Experiment, in which Solomon Asch attempted to see just how social pressure made a person conform, with about seventy five percent of all the people he tested conforming at least once when responding to the experiment (McLeod).
It is also notable that there are few people in the world who possess the skills that are required in order to truly appreciate art. While most who have not been trained might be able to find the beauty inside of a piece of art, it takes people who have been trained in that area to truly see what an artist is trying to convey. Since art has been around since the beginning of the evolution of humans, it is definitely certain that we appreciate art to a certain extent. But today, where commercials are full of stick thin women and men on steroids, it is important to point out that our perceptions of beauty might not be ours, but society’s. Additionally, in order to appreciate art well, a person’s basic needs have to be satisfied. Ask a poor and starving man if he would rather have a three course meal or a Picasso, assuming that he doesn’t know that it is a Picasso, and I bet you he would choose the meal. Why? Because one of his basic needs, hunger, is yet to be satisfied. It is because of this that some people have more capacity to appreciate art than others, since its value has not been overshadowed by something else. As art teacher Ren Min says, “To appreciate art, one has to be at peace on the inside. You can’t have other things bothering you.” And in the busy world of today, is anyone totally at peace?

Perhaps our society now is divided upon their appreciation of art. Maybe some of us appreciate art the way it should be appreciated, and everyone else seems to because they’re conforming to the others. Or it could be that there is just a small percentage of the population that is conforming to the majority of the rest of the world. Or could it all be a lie, that appreciating art is just a thing that we all pretend to do?