Art is a hole drilled into your skull.

The most important aspect of art, I think, is the moment of recognition - the moment when the viewer sees his or her self in the artwork, when they recognize what they are feeling or have felt in the past in a piece of art. The idealized version of how art works is something like this: artists portray some feeling or sense they have, then everyone who looks at their work is struck with the same feeling or sense. Ideally, it's a way into another person's mind that usual forms of communication don't allow. In practice we probably all get slightly different things out of any given piece of art, but the idea is still the same. It's about seeing something from our minds outside of our selves, which allows us to examine that thing and feel (maybe mistakenly) that we are not alone with it. Making art is a reaction against the physicality and ultimate separateness of humans. It's a hole drilled into a skull.
-Dave Hanyok