A painting by Mark Rothko.
His works belong to the most expensive pieces of art ever created.
Source: wikiart.org
One of the possible answers: some artworks are supposed to be extremely, astonishingly good externalization of ideas dwelling in minds of their authors – ideas understood as different aspects of one Being. I shall call them idealetheion(s): perfect paintings, drawings, or melodies. All of them would be eternal, nonetheless each one of them would be internalized (“perceived”) just by one human being.
Some people would be especially capable of externalizing idealetheions in forms of real shapes, colors, lines, and sounds. Other persons could recognize their own idealetheions as more or less similar to those depicted by artists, therefore they might try to assess how skillfully idealetheions have been externalized.
How could one know that an idealetheion perceived by an artist would be similar to these perceived by herself/himself? It is intuitive.
Detail from the painting Girl Before a Mirror by Pablo Picasso.
Picture taken from this site.
Marcin Dolecki 
Heh, I’m sorry, but my “intuitiveness” seems to have left the building. I’m a bit of a pack rat and have regularly carted home things that others have left out for the sanitation trucks over the years. I most definitely would NOT have picked up that painting by Mark Rothko.
And… to make things even stranger… I entered the painting on TinEye.com (dunno if this will show… If not just enter it yourself? http://www.tineye.com/search/49ae920b9e1ca88c76db846efd5ece6928cf5915/?sort=size&order=desc&pluginver=chrome-1.1.4 ) and TinEye, for the first time I’ve ever seen this message, refused to look for it! It said “Your image is too simple to create a unique fingerprint.”
:!
MJM
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🙂
When I saw a painting by Rothko for the first time I coudn`t understand why on earth it is so expensive. I thought that it had happened just by coincidence, only due to extremely favorable circumstances. It`s definitely not the type of art I adore.
Nevertheless, I tried to find an alternative explanation, so I thought about idealetheions – an infinite number of eternal, immutable, ideal artworks (it`s rather just a loose idea than a strong metaphysical concept). One idealetheion would be perceived only by one person, sometimes only for a moment, in turn, one person would see a great number of idealetheions in her/his life, and other people could see at most similar idealetheions, in other words: every one of us has his/her own set of “perceived aspects” of the Absolute.
If it`s true, I would be rather unable to see any idealetheions similar to these visualized by Rothko, but perhaps they are clearly visible for many other people who highly appeciate his art – as close to an ideal.
Or maybe Rothko just had a lot of luck.
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And you’re quite correct: beauty is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder.
🙂
Michael
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Yes 🙂
I also tried to say something about the relation between subjectivity and objectivity in art – from the layperson`s perspective.
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I prefer rather such type of art:
🙂
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