READ.

These are giant letters, taller than a human, tattooed in paint on the bridge-side, in the valley of an urban part of town—an artist has spoken.

Tell me that that is not artwork. READ. It is encouraging the source, the foundation of all beauty and knowledge: Books. Even if it is a command scrawled on the side of a bridge in graffiti? Does it not hold a mirror to life? Does it matter whose life? What is the difference between the mankind who painted the graffiti, and the man-unkind who wrote the book on how to paint like Rembrandt? Tradition? Art is the link to culture. READ. Art creates you even as you create it. This is because it is the soul of human race. Each piece of art represents the varying souls of its creators. Our creations become us, know us, and change us. Through this imitation, art no longer MEANS something, but IS something. Art is past the tangible and ascends into the beyondness that you dare not name. It is instead poured out onto paper or into stone, clay or any other medium that is art: expression driven through the artist. The artist: a clear and deified passageway through which pours all language, dialect, and communication of the universe.

But if art springs from a diminished creature’s soul, mass manufactured to suckle the hive of contemporary souls, it is bad art. Even though it expresses a perversion of a human soul—it lacks the interior of true art. Is its goal knowledge? Or coinage? What is art, ask again? Intellectual intercourse: Human reason consecrated by existence. READ. ART. One reads art by analyzing, attempting to explain what we cannot understand, focusing on the clarity of its definition, but never finding it—for it only exists. (Hannah C.)