After spending the semester observing, experimenting, and occasionally placing celery around cities, it’s time for the next logical step: talking to people.
I already conducted a handful of interviews last semester, conversations with outsiders, insiders, and fellow students about how they perceive art. But I want to expand that dialogue.
Over the summer and into the coming months, I plan to carry out a more extensive series of interviews: around 10 to 15 people, spanning different age groups, professions, and backgrounds. Some of them will be from creative fields, some won’t. Some will be my age, others much older. The goal is to create a broad, loosely representative set of perspectives, and see how the concept of “art” shifts across generations and cultures.
The Plan
My interviews will follow two main threads:
1. General Questions About Art
Simple, open-ended questions like:
- What is art to you?
- What makes something “worthy” of being called art?
- Have you ever been moved by something unexpected?
- Do you think art needs to be intentional?
The goal here is not to find the “right” answers, but to map different assumptions, values, and emotional reactions. I want to understand how people’s personal experiences shape their sense of what art is and isn’t.
2. Image-Based Reactions
Here’s where it gets really interesting: I plan to show each person a selection of my everyday installation photos the ones I plan to share on Instagram. I’ll ask them to interpret the image freely, without knowing anything about it.
Then, I’ll show them the explanation I wrote. And I’ll ask:
- Did your opinion change?
- Do you see something different now?
- Does a title influence your reading?
- What happens when there’s no label at all?
And finally I’ll throw in a few completely random images. Photos I took without any deeper meaning. Just banal, normal street scenes. Things I didn’t consider “artistic” at all.
I want to see if people still assign meaning to those too.
Will they interpret anything if I ask the right question?
Can we create significance just by suggesting there might be some?
The Placebo of Interpretation
This experiment touches something I’ve been circling all semester:
How much of art is about the work and how much is about the context we give it? If I tell someone, “This is art,” will they start seeing it that way even if it’s just a photo of a trash can? And if someone finds meaning in something I didn’t plan, is that less valid? Or is that the whole point? These are the questions I want to explore not just in my own reflections, but by borrowing other people’s eyes for a while.
If I’m lucky, I’ll manage to interview 1 or 2 known artists, too.
I’d especially love to speak to Paulus Goerden, whose work has inspired so much of my thinking. It honestly feels like a dream goal, but who knows? Maybe I’ll manifest it.
