Our working definition of art deals with “human experience”; however, a distinction needs to be made between subjective and objective human experience. This is not to polarize the two or suggest that a choice be made between them; rather, it is to say that components touching more on objective reality must be included for a work to be anything other than an adolescent exercise in self-indulgence. To bring to consciousness some aspect of human experience in the heart and mind of an addressee, an object must reflect the artist’s specific, individual, subjective experience in a way that makes it yet be about more than the artist.

One way to accomplish this is for an artist to try and objectify any personal experience under consideration in the process of organizing a work. While “God,” “personal relationships,” “love,” etc. are all valid human experiences to try and bring to consciousness through artistic means, a young artist’s own experience of such things is often largely subjective. An artist must develop the ability to put personal experience into a context larger than that of the experience itself, and of the artist’s own thoughts, memories and imagination of it.

A useful procedure in this regard is to presuppose that any personal experiences an artist is trying to bring to the consciousness of addressees can potentially have any and every kind of significance beyond what is immediate to the artist. To avoid creating something likely received as self-referential drivel, artists can and should ask specifically what kinds of broader, shared significance their own experiences could have. Such broader, shared significance could be understood as social, cultural, material, etc. 

To break it down, every personal experience has societal, political, commonly spiritual, physiological, economic, systemic, developmental, physical, collectively moral, deeply psychological, philosophical (etc.) significance. When any and all possible facets of significance are considered during the process of creating what is intended as an art object, the object stands a better chance of bringing to consciousness some aspect of human experience significant to an addressee. An artist who assumes an art work’s addressees will be interested in the artist’s personal experience, or equate it with their own experiences or those of others, without the work reflecting the broader significance of the artist’s experience, creates a situation where the artist “mistakes” a potential addressee “for someone who cares.”

Another way for an artist to add an objective dimension to the creation of works is to consider human experiences known and held significant to the artist, yet outside the artist’s own, actual experience—the artist’s experience of human experience, as it were. For example, a person need never have parachuted from a plane to consider vicariously the thrill of skydiving. A person need never have starved to try and create pathos on behalf of such human suffering. A person need never have engaged in combat, been traumatized by exposure to violence, or displaced as a refugee to consider the horror of war as human experience. In all these examples, the artist’s own reactions to thoughts of such experiences would be subjective, but the experiences themselves would remain objective in terms of the artist’s lived experience.

With such human experience already placed in the object position with respect to the artist, there is a ready-made distinction between the artist’s objective observation and the artist’s subjective response. Such a situation may leave an artist freer to reflect on the subjective experience of something already about more than the artist.

Either way, it is important for an artist to include some kind of more objective component in a work so potential addressees cannot so easily write it off as personal indulgence significant only to the artist, thereby remaining unaddressed by the object and unconscious of aspects of broader human experience it may reflect.