Arts week is coming at y’all thanks to the amazing Comms and Events team at VUWSA, and I am very excited about it. I’m going to come right out and say that I am an Art History nerd. Without sounding like too much of a bougie fuckboi, art can enrich your life through opening your eyes to someone else’s perspective. An artist’s work speaks about their personal journey, their relationship to the world around them, and their history.

I remember walking around the Musee D’Orsay in Paris with a friend who was living there at the time. Walking through a museum is a completely different experience when you can understand the movements and the history behind the works. Everything I saw, I had studied at some point in my life, but I came across Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and I just started bawling. I have no idea why. I didn’t particularly like the work, nor do I like it now, but the emotional response to a work created 154 years before is why art is so amazing.

Now some works you can look at and ask if it is actually “art”, and I promise you that there will be some that you see at the Student Art Exhibition at MC 201 that will make you wonder. That’s the beauty of art though. We can debate until the cows come home about whether the umbrella which I am going to submit is art. However, through putting it in a different context, you can change its meaning and create something different.

Will it sell? Probably not. But I’ll take comfort in the fact that Van Gogh sold only one work in his lifetime too. So at the moment I’m currently only one painting less than Van Gogh.