As a whole, I believe art is used to define the creative world around us. For something to be considered “art”, it doesn’t have to be in a museum, nor does it have to be a painting. To me, art can be anything from a film, to a photograph, to graffiti on the walls of New York. If people are able to attach meaning and relate to a creative piece, then it is considered art.

Art is a very large portion of my life. I love photography and despite a busy schedule, try to go shooting with my friends at least twice a week. I began my creative journey in 2015, after coming across a photography page on Instagram. I grabbed the camera laying around my house that nobody used, and went to take pictures of trees, bridges, cars, and anything that I saw as creative. As I gained more knowledge and experience with photography, I bought myself an actual DSLR, and began to focus my photography on urban/street photography. This primarily includes streets, subways, buildings, roofs, and anything that pretty much screams “New York” when looked at. I also began to experiment with online software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom.

For this class, I want to learn a couple of things. To begin, I want to learn about some of the history of art, especially modern art and their techniques and how they came to be. More importantly however, I want to understand why people deem some things as art, and other things not. I have seen museum exhibitions where there are blank canvasses on the wall, or perhaps have a few lines or splats of paint, and people go crazy over them. On the other hand, I have seen beautiful works of art such as photographs, paintings, or sculptures that people seem to brush past or not appreciate. As I stated, art to me is being able to relate or connect to a piece. I want to understand how people are connecting to lines, as opposed to, in my opinion, more detailed and dedicated works of art.