The arts I like seem to be out of date: Western classical music, Chinese classical literature and so on. Contemporary art, on the other hand, seems too technical to me. My son and I are of a generation with a profound gap in artistic tastes and opinions. We often compete for sound space in our homes. He likes music that I can't stand. And the music I like, he doesn't understand.

Faced with this situation, I am deeply puzzled: has the human heart changed fundamentally? Some of the works in the contemporary art category are said to be great, and I have been to exhibitions of these works, exhibitions of paintings or sculptures. But I don't understand it. I can't accept it, understand it or appreciate it. In the face of these works, I am indifferent, have no feelings. Art, I thought, was something that should move me, not a mystery for me to guess. Many modern works for me are riddles, I always guess, so, actually doubt their own intelligence. Gradually, I discovered that artists seem to have a kind of secret pact, a secret pact between peers, they make a pact, they recognize each other. In this way, a man, now that he has the title of an artist, can put a number on his work, "The number of the work," and show it to the public, so that everyone can guess the mystery. All of this leads to my confusion, which leads to today's title: Art and Truth. I'm not here to bash contemporary art, but simply to reunderstand it. What is art?

What is the essence of art? What is a true work of art? Such questions are the subject of philosophy of art. I teach Philosophy of Art at Fudan University. I speak with much less confidence in this course than I do in Introduction to Philosophy. Most of the examples I give in class belong to classical art. I realized that these monumental works of art are actually far away from our young generation today, not only from the young generation in China, but also from the young generation in the West. We have to ask again: in what sense do we human beings need art, and what kind of art works do we need? I've read some important aesthetic literature, and I've found that there are roughly four kinds of answers. The first is that art satisfies the need of aesthetic taste. In addition to all kinds of sensory needs of human beings, the highest sensory needs are the satisfaction of aesthetic taste. We have an aesthetic need for the combination of forms and patterns and colors, a certain combination of sounds. To satisfy this need, we create art. The answer can be summed up in the following words: beauty is in form. "Beauty is a form of meaning", this is the 20th century aesthetician Clive Bell said, this is his definition of beauty. For a time, I thought this definition made sense. As it turned out, this definition failed to distinguish art from artifact. A craft also has a form that satisfies aesthetic tastes. If works of art exist only in this sense, to push this view to the extreme is "aestheticism". Of course, there are many other important ideas in aestheticism, but its general principle is still "beauty in form". The second understanding of art is that it serves our need to daydream. In reality, our wishes often do not come true, so let us dream in art. But this understanding, I think, still leaves the essence of art. In this understanding, works of art are merely the product of certain psychological needs. What we can't do in reality, we can achieve illusory realization through art works -- this is not the root of the existence of art. The third answer is that art is about releasing our repressed emotions. Sometimes the real life is very cold, we have a lot of emotions can not be relieved and released in reality, so we can only turn to art works to help us vent. In artistic activities, we express anger or revelry in order to relieve inner pressure and restore balance so that we can better withstand new pressures. The fourth understanding is to regard art as high entertainment. We play within art, and there's something appealing about this kind of play, that it's not repetitive, it's creative. For example, we go to the Pottery Bar, and the clay shapes itself in the rotating axis, so I become an artist. Or, we drink coffee in a cafe, always with music in the background to accompany our small talk. The music may take a few beautiful melodies from Mozart, or Beethoven, or Brahms, or some other composer, and let them set the mood of our conversation. I've given you four answers to questions about the nature of art. None of these four answers satisfy us because they fail to tell the truth about what truly great works of art do to our minds. These works are not meant to entertain us, to satisfy our aesthetic tastes, to daydream or to help us vent our feelings. They inspire us, they guide us, they nourish our minds, they are the teachers of our souls. Hegel has a saying: "Poetry is always the great teacher of mankind." The same is true of all great works of art. Works of art are created by human beings themselves, not God, but can be our mentor, so the field of art is very magical. If we look back at the history of art, we will find that it is also the history of the progress of the human mind, the history of the continuous enrichment of the human heart. If we insist on understanding art in this sense, then the first four answers do not touch the root of art.