Do we need to analyse art?

Is it art something to be analysed and teach?

Some time ago,  I saw this video:

It has being a long time since I saw something on the internet that moved me to the point that I share a couple of tears.  And it’s not only that this young man speaks with passion, it’s that what he said resonates with me deep inside.

I love art in all its forms, my favourite being of course music, but poetry is a close second. Both get a special shining brilliance when they become performing arts. Surely, you can enjoy a recording of a song/melody and enjoy deeply the reading of a poetry book, but the strength and power that some people have when performing makes them go to a level that can move you inside as no other.

But performing or not, art needs to be about feelings, about searching beauty and pleasure, for beauty and pleasure sake.   We live in world when everything is analyzed, we read reviews and critics talk about the technicalities of the piece of art itself, we ask our students to give objective and academic reviews of works.  How good is the musician technique, how perfect are the lights and perspective in photography, how well written is a poem; but I find that people forget to mention what is really important, what does that piece of art made you feel?

Is it art something that really belongs to the academia? Professional artists, who spend years learning their skills on the academia have the advantage of a better knowledge of their tools, they even get clues on how to enhance their creative part.  A composer who understands the technicalities of orchestration have the tools to make great compositions. So I’m not talking about the people who go to colleges and universities to be professionals, they deserve all my respect, and I fully understand why that’s needed. Although I would add that for there are people whose talent is so great that even if they are self taught, they can produce monumental master pieces.


And furthermore, academic art, is becoming and intellectual exercise, it's losing it's most important basis, to be the conveyor of your feelings.  You go out to a concert, listen to the piece, and it doesn't move you inside, you will probably understand the author on an intellectual level, see the good practices and techniques, see why he mixed or used certain motives, and even enjoy it very much with the rational part of your brain. But In my humble opinion, that's not what art is about.

But when art becomes something of the elites, something that needs to be analyzed, or needs to be understood under certain parameters, it loose its soul.  There’s something deeply wrong with the educational system that force students to submit essays about a poem or a symphony, there’s something broken when the critics focus solely on the production, techniques and make their reviews an academic exercise.

Are there really good and bad works of art, or just art that moves you and the one who doesn’t.  Is the commercial popular art fulfilling its role as a medium of feeling-share or just a commercial goal? Is the academic and historic art too elitists?  Do we need a change on our perception of it from schools to day-to-day life?