What Is Art?

Deep down I believe that there is no successful way to define art; but if we don't try, we'll also be giving up the ability to appreciate and criticize it.  My first attempt at defining art would be imagery that is symbolically expressive.  Art can be seen many places in many things, but that doesn't make it "good" or even intentional - this makes its spectrum for qualification is an incredibly broad one.  The more concrete the definition is, the more concentrated the genre is, less and less art will qualify.  The idea of "art for art's sake" even is far too narrow a field to include a large chunk of the "classics" of the art world, which have played a role so essential to its molding that they've influenced even the artists who devote themselves to attempting art free of any influence.  It can be distinguished from commissioned and/or utilitarian art, but it cannot exclude them from claim or belonging to the concept of art.  The style and content by which an artist creates any work of art will determine what kind and how large of an audience they will be catering to; for example, complexity often lowers the outreach of art (though, of course, not always).

The evolution of humanity and of its art also makes up a large defining factor.  With respect to this, I think it futile to craft one definition of art to pinpoint what it has been throughout all of its transformational periods - not all sequential, not all chronological, not all linear.  While Rome was influencing China and vice versa, the Middle East and the British Isles were intertwining themselves stylistically, all via trade, politics and the general growth of civilization.  Even in a linear context, it is hard to let art that has been born of many periods of expansion/refinement fall under the same critique, or be analyzed by the same limits.  For example, primitive art has mostly been made by those to whom the idea of art for art's sake had not yet occurred; they hadn't quite begun to act on expressive impulse yet in a way that would produce art free of any other primary function.  But many things ancient crafters represented artistically on their utilitarian objects are the same or similar in content and meaning to works of art made in all the periods that succeeded them; themes of survival, themes of love, themes of archetypal society.  Is a nude study by Picasso, intent on an original representation of life forms atop a relatable message of fertility, any more qualified as "art" than a woman's figure on a basket that had another function?  The significance of a piece's subject matter to society is very important to one's ability to classify it as art or not.  One good example of this is America's patriotic symbol of government, the White House.  (http://www.infoplease.com/images/white_house_1846_small.jpg)  Collaboratively designed by Thomas Jefferson, this work of architecture makes allusions to some of the most innovative and artistic buildings in history, and it was intended to both have esteem of its own and to be recognized as aware of the history of architecture, structurally and politically.  Another good example of art's importance in society is fashion.  The clothes we wear on the daily are artistic expressions, but many would disqualify them as art as quickly as they would disqualify any person on the street wearing clothes as an artist.  But there is art in fashion, and historically, clothing has often been treated as a canvas for social statements by artistic means.  To further explore the prevalent standards of art, I'd like to bring up "readymades": the objects lacking artistic value that have been reconsidered artistically by an artist and transformed to relate an artistic message, though the artist didn't create the object itself.  The most notable example is Duchamp's "Fountain" (http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/images/fountain.jpg ...some of you may have seen a rendition of this in our ceramics lab), which was in fact just a urinal before he considered it a fountain.  Now it has been transformed, and is notorious for the perspective that values an artist's mind more than his hand that it brought to the art world, and the effect it had there.  So, in conclusion, we can do our best to rope all art everywhere into the confines of one definition, but I feel it wouldn't get us very far in understanding art.