Lady In A Veil Analysis

Axel Contreras

Professor Mendoza

English 1301 SP4

October 3, 2017

The Value of Art Art is a significant part of our everyday lives typically involving all forms of entertainment and the way in which we express ourselves. I thoroughly enjoy trying to find the meaning in many forms of art due to my lack of talent in that area, but it only allows me to have a deeper appreciation for it. It is for this reason that I have chosen to analyze the topic of arts and letters, and to gain insight on what art truly is. “Lady in a Veil” written by Lewis H. Lapham, consists of contrasting what people believe to be the value of art and what they convey it to be. He begins by quoting Tolstoy whom referred to art as a means of sharing one’s feelings with others,

The author demonstrates this by stating that people are “more interested in what Van Gogh’s deranged hand did to his ear than what his incomparable eye saw in the sunlight at Arles” (Lapham). Lapham is trying to persuade the reader that we need to place the value of art back into its meaning and forget about how much money it is worth. He expands on this by demonstrating how placing the value of art in its monetary worth renders the art insignificant, for we are ignoring the message it is trying to relay. “Beauty is a Shoe” by Wendy Steiner focuses on the emphasis that is placed on beauty in art. Throughout the article Steiner speaks about how visual arts focus on aestheticism using women and ornaments to appeal to our primitive desires, rather than focusing on the meaning of the piece, with the meaning symbolizing the beauty of an artwork. She also states how focusing on the aesthetic aspect of an art piece can be impure due to over sexualizing it or adding unnecessary decorations such as colors to appeal to the viewers, with many paintings and photographs/films using nude women to garner a larger

She demonstrates this by stating, “Unlike the various formalisms of the twentieth century, such an aesthetic envisions art as an interaction with the potential for mutuality, equality, and empathy, and these are emerging as the new attributes of beauty.” (Steiner). The sentence demonstrates the main topic of the article by showing the different meanings that beauty has, which in this case was aestheticism and is now represented by “mutuality, equality, and empathy” (Steiner). Steiner also shows the importance of beauty by mentioning that every art piece has a model which serves as an “interactive bridge between the real and the virtual”, with the real signifying the current situation of the world and virtual being representative of our ideals. Although beauty is often used to mean aestheticism; it truly refers to the meaning of an art piece, which often lies in the