In his most recent blog, Sean asks, “Since everyone grows up with different influences do you think it is possible for different groups of people without distraction to all have the same opinion?”
Similar to the question I raised in my last blog, I was also engaged by this topic of discussion. Say one person had a near perfect childhood growing up and another had a very different complicated childhood and perhaps was forced to grow up sooner than the first person. In some instances, these two people may have the same opinion on a single work of art and that work can be the one unitary thing between these two people of varying backgrounds; in other cases, however, because of their very different life experiences, their opinions on the same work of art could be vastly different.
Take, for instance, The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. People who had a sinister or disturbing upbringing may see the piece as dark, focusing only on the deep blues and high dark mountain top; someone who had a happier upbringing, however, may see the wavy patterns, the mix of blues, and the yellow star beams as optimistic and romantic.
Surely, there are many more instances of this type of conundrum in art. Can you think of any others? Or, for that matter, any way to come up with a concrete answer; can people of varying backgrounds and experiences ever have the exact same opinion of a work of art?
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