First Impressions

This post is a response to Aditi's response to Shawna's post on beauty.

When an observer first looks at a work of art they immediately have a first impression and, in this case, the impression is a emotion that is evoked. Be it, 'This is stupid,' 'This is beautiful,' or 'This is confusing," these immediate feelings we have are unavoidable.  But we can not just judge a book by its cover, we need to look into it, read the book or in this case, the work of art.
Using the example of the painting of a flower, if the observer looks at it and thinks, "Wow! That is a beautiful painting and I love it!" but the artist intended it to be ironic and that they found the flower hideous and hated it then the painting would not be doing its job.  And that job is to transport the emotion felt by the  artist to the observer.