What Is The Purpose of Art?

Traditionally art has had the role of being society’s eye opener. Art must make strong statements and spark a cultural debate. Debates about new issues can lead to change just like new technology, and thus art may lead to new trends and be an agent in the process of change in a society. Making art and engaging in a cultural debate empowers the female artist.

Strong visual statements are often considered provocative; however the artists are not necessarily provocateurs, anarchists or rebels at heart. They are just exploring and turning what their generation and their parents say or do not say into art. The visualization of taboos, the unspoken and the emotional sub current of their home country/ generation/ subculture often spark phobia among the viewers and the mass medias.

Nothing like a photo can change the way we look at things. The visual language of photography and art awakens our emotions and ethics. Strong images can also set our emotions off in ways, which we can’t control. We may feel high, falling in love with an image and love the experience, or feel taken a back by what we see and even feel violated by images, which we would rather not have seen at all. It can be an uplifting experience to see a good exhibition or a bad one for some people to see explicit images of for example sex, illicit love, gender experiments, loneliness, war and death.

At an art show the (lesbian) artist invites her viewer to indulge in her visual world. Lesbian art and queer art are important to the lesbian subculture, as they reflect the lesbian experience and help us to understand our selves.

As concept of “queer” was adopted by the art world as “queer art” in the 1980’ies a new way of looking at the role of the artist was defined: She is sender of a message and her viewers are a receivers of a gendered message. The lesbian identified/ queer female artist can thus so to say “flirt” with her female audience through the emotional messages of her works of art.