What Is It, That Thing We Call Art?

I was listening to a podcast recently (probably a good sixth of my life is spent listening to those things) and they were discussing art.  Most of the times I really enjoy listening to podcasts and can find at least some good to extract from them - even the one's that aren't very good - but this one was especially bad because their discussion was aimless.  One guy would ask, "Do you think this is art?" and everyone had to throw out an opinion.  Then the next guy asked if something else was art and everyone again gave their opinion.  They had exactly no set standard for what art is or isn't.  They didn't set a bare minimum or even try to define what art is.

I want to give the bare minimum of what I believe art is.  This standard does not judge whether a piece of art is good or not, it can only be used to judge if something is a piece of art or not.  There are three basic elements that any work needs to be considered art.

First, for something to be considered art it must be a human creation.  (I covered this idea in a previous post).  I know there is a lot of people out there that would love to claim that an ocean is a work of art or a mountain or a forest or a newborn baby or the stars.  However, they are not because they are not human inventions.  They are a product of nature, God, evolution, space aliens or whatever you believe they came from.  They may be astoundingly beautiful, breathtaking, life changing, awe inspiring, intellectually stimulating.  They may have elements of what you believe good art should have, they may be detailed, they may look as if they were painted by the perfect hand using the perfect brush.  But they are not created by humans and therefore cannot be considered works of art.  They are entirely another category.

Secondly, for something to be considered a work of art, it has to be made with the intent of it becoming a work of art.  I know, this one's a bit murky and sometimes we may not always have the details of the artist's - or non-artist's - intentions.  But let's explore this a little more.  So if I went to my backyard and began mowing the lawn only to discover that after I was done, the way that I mowed my lawn produced an image even more wonderful than the Mona Lisa, could I consider that a work of art?  No.  We can say that this picture in my lawn may tell us something about chance or coincidence or randomness, or that it tells us something about the subconscious and its abilities, but we cannot consider it a piece of art because it wasn't intended to be so at the time I was creating it.

But there are other interesting applications to this implication.

I am a big fan of film.  However, Hollywood pumps out millions of dollars worth of shitty movies each year, and probably many of those movies have directors, producers, actors, set designers, etc. that don't consider what they are doing to be in anyway artful.  Many, I would guess, are producing these movies to make money, to entertain or to move their careers forward.  But these films cannot, no matter how arty they may appear, be considered works of art if they do not have that intention in mind.

Here's another interesting thing (and this is where things get a little murky).  Consider a painter who, as she is painting a picture, intends what she is painting to be a work of art, but at the same time has no idea about the elements of art or has never thought about art in depth in anyway.  Is that painting a work of art?  I really want to say no but I would have to say yes.  By the barest minimum of standards, what she is creating is a work of art (provided it follows the other two steps as well).  Why I would hesitate to say no is because I believe that a sufficient lack of understanding of art is akin to not even using the word correctly, or even knowing what it means, and therefore she, the painter, would have the intent but not a true intent of creating real art.  But then this begs the question that there are very real and in depth standards of what art is (fine art) and is not (kitsch) and that my understanding of art is superior than hers.  However, since I am only setting up a bare minimum, I will grant it that, at the lowest setting, the painter, having an glimmer of an idea about what art is, is producing a piece of art when she intends to do so.

The third criteria for what can be considered art, is that the artist must make a real attempt at finding an audience for that work.  A poem sitting in a drawer at home, no matter how beautiful, cannot be a work of art if it doesn't have a larger audience.  This is because there is no difference between something invisible and something unseen; there is no difference between silence and something unheard.  I could tell you that I have written the greatest novel but that I burnt it in a fire and you would never know whether it was or not, nor would you really care.  These unseen, unheard, not experienced works are uninteresting because they do not exist outside of the person who created them and therefore cannot be considered works of art.  But I believe that just the real attempt of someone trying to share their creation with other humans can make that creation a piece of art.

This also brings up another interesting thing..  If some intended work of art is too cryptic to be decoded by even the most dedicated audience, and therefore that audience really can't experience that piece of art, is it then a work of art?  Is there any difference between the unseen creation and the one that cannot be decoded?  I'll leave these questions, for now, unanswered.  (I also want to give credit to Joyce for supplying some of these ideas).