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People make art for many overlapping reasons: to explore experience, express what they feel or notice, communicate with others, enjoy the act of making, or take part in cultural and community life. No single motive explains every artist or artwork; a person’s reasons can depend on the medium, circumstances, and audience.
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Making art can turn scattered thoughts, feelings, or observations into a form that can be revisited and shared. Choreographer Gina Gibney described the process this way: “For me, creating art brings things back together.” She was speaking about her own practice, in which making work gathers fragmented thoughts and feelings into a cohesive form—not laying down a rule for every artist. Greater Good Magazine’s interviews with seven artists offer individual accounts rather than a representative survey.
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Art education scholar Tom Anderson offered another account in a 2004 article: “At the root of it, we make art to make sense of things, to give meaning to our existence.” That is a perspective on art-making, not a proven universal explanation. ERIC’s abstract of Anderson’s article records the claim.
Art can express and communicate a point of view
Some artists make work to express how they see the world and invite others into that perspective. Poet Kwame Dawes described wanting to communicate “my sense of the world—that way of understanding, engaging, experiencing the world—to somebody else.” The aim is not necessarily to deliver a single clear message: a painting, poem, or performance can communicate through mood, form, image, or ambiguity as well as through explicit statements.
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Communication also helps explain why viewers ask about an artwork’s meaning. In a 2012 account of visitor interviews, the Museum of Modern Art reported that 60% of the visitors interviewed wanted to know why an artist made a particular work, what it meant to the artist, and what it might mean to viewers. That figure describes those interviewees, not artists’ motives or the public as a whole. MoMA’s account includes visitors’ questions: “What possessed the artist to make this? What did it mean to him at that time? What is it supposed to mean to us?”
Making can be rewarding in itself
The process can offer curiosity, challenge, discovery, or the pleasure of working with a medium, whether or not the result is shown publicly. Artist and educator Harrell Fletcher put it personally: “I like to say that what I’m after is to have an interesting life, and doing the work that I do as an artist helps me achieve that.” A person may value the experience of making, the finished work, or both; motives can also include external aims such as recognition or income.
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Art can connect people and communities
Art is not always made alone or for a private purpose. Artists may share a performance, give voice to community experience, collaborate with others, or work within a cultural tradition. These are among the possibilities in the artist interviews, but they do not mean all art is intended to serve a public or social function.
A 2017 review by Aleksandra Sherman and Tamar Morrissey argues that art’s value can extend beyond beauty and pleasure to include communication and possible connections with self-knowledge, personal growth, and challenging preconceptions. The authors discuss these as questions for understanding art’s value, not guaranteed effects of making or viewing any particular work. Their review focuses principally on art appreciation, while arguing that its social-practice perspective can also inform how people think about art-making. Read the review in Frontiers in Psychology.
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There is no single motive or settled universal explanation
One person may make a painting to explore a feeling, enjoy the process, communicate with an audience, and earn a living—all at once. Another may make art without intending to exhibit or explain it. The examples above show a range of individual reasons; they do not establish how common any one motive is among artists.
The National Endowment for the Arts’ 2020 report, Why We Engage: Attending, Creating, and Performing Art, examines adult motivations and barriers using the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and the 2016 General Social Survey. Its official landing page describes that scope, but does not provide detailed results to support specific percentages here. See the NEA report page.
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These accounts also do not show that making art reliably treats a health condition or produces a particular response in viewers. A maker’s intention and an artwork’s effects are different questions.
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