What is art?
Art doesn’t submit easily to definition. Every time you think you’ve got it pinned down, it seems to slip away. Is it the Velazquez in the museum, the Hemingway on your bookshelf, the iPhone in your pocket, the thirty-second ad on your television screen? All four? It seems that in accommodating such a wide range of objects that qualify as art, that the term may be useless. If, in the 21st century, anything can be art, then what’s the point?
The key seems to lie in anything. After all, where is the beauty in a painting, or the grace in a symphony? It’s not in the piece of art itself. Beauty and form and movement cannot be held up for physical scrutiny. Art isn’t just an object to be beheld. It needs an audience. But art isn’t in the viewer, either. The work is independent of the audience, though it could not exist without it.
Or maybe the key lies in useless. Because art is often defiantly useless, without a clear point or function or relationship to the observed world. Is art any item that refuses to be reducible to its value on the market? Warhol fans would disagree.
Or maybe the key lies in can. If anything can be art, does it follow that everything is? Maybe we can find a definition if we can say what art is not. But some of what we mean by art is more than placing a set of objects labeled “Art” alongside a set of objects labeled “Not Art.” Works have value and a material being in themselves. The classification of being art or not being art doesn’t change the piece itself.
So maybe art is neither in the audience nor the work, but the relationship between them. This relationship is powerful, as it allows the viewer access to the imagined world of the creator in addition to the material world before them, and to understand how they shape each other. So this is one definition, and like all definitions it is limited, subjective and flawed:
Art is a spirit of creation and discovery that opens up a space between people and nature for the voice of truth to speak unfettered.
Art would demand you improve upon it.
As I was thinking about how to answer this question, I felt that my definition of art was never comprehensive enough, never inclusive enough. After thinking, the only response that actually encompasses how I feel about art lies in the question, what is NOT art? Art is everywhere we are and in everything that we see. Giving art a definition seems to be an injustice in that art is limitless and confining “art” to a description of words and descriptions contradicts its essence. Art is not meant to be understood logically, it is meant to be felt.
In my experience, I’ve come to believe that art is a medium for emotion and experience. When art reaches its full potential, it is created with an emotion and an image, which is then evoked in a recipient who is able to do so. This is why some people are affected by certain works of art more than others; due to their own personal experience, some relate better to the true intentions of the creator.
Great article. I really like it. Thanks for information a lot.
There is no right way to go about explaining how the world is affected by such thinking. Maybe the Rainbow Unicorn can shed some light on the subject.
Picasso light painting
