The question “What is art?” frequently comes up in various of my art groups. Usually it is asked within the context of “Art vs. Craft” or “Good Art vs. Bad Art.” Without getting into the debate over whether or not various works of craft can rise to the level of art, or whether or not artwork A is “better” than artwork B, I’d like to share my own definition of art. This was originally written for a paper on the challenges faced by fine arts museums in interpreting ethnographic art–specifically, Precolumbian funerary ceramics from Western Mexico.
What Is Art?
What makes people unique among animals is culture. Culture is made possible by the sharing of ideas, feelings, and events through symbolic language. This sharing of experiences allows humans to pass on information from one geographical area to another and from one generation to the next. These shared ideas can become behavior patterns that, when repeated across a population and through time, become culture. Unlike humans, when an animal dies, its experiences generally die with it.
Art is nothing more than a highly symbolic form of visual language. Traditionally, it is the representation of ideas and experiences so that others can share in those ideas and experiences with the artist. The observer is given a rare glimpse of the world through the artist’s eyes. When the work of an ancient artist reaches across vast tracts of time to touch the people of today, this message from the past becomes even more precious. In the words of George Kubler, “Here is without doubt one of the most significant of all the mechanisms of cultural continuity, when the visible work of an extinct generation still can issue such powerful stimuli.” This sharing of experiences is necessary for every human in every culture.
If we accept the definition of art as the rendering of truth in sensible form, and truth as the interpretation of human experience, it is obvious that a work of art is essentially communicative. It must mean something to someone other than the person who created it–in fact, and more important still, it can mean the same thing or several different things to a number of persons. But meaning it must have. (Francis Henry Taylor, “The Archaic Smile,” Daedalus, Autumn 1957, p. 313.)
However hard we may try, we cannot separate ourselves from the social structures that make us human. Art is the re-presentation of that human experience. Art is dependant upon culture and culture isdependant upon art; man creates art and art creates man. Art is a dialogue between ourselves and our fellow humans concerning the world around us. Even if the “subject” of art is not directly linked to the human experience, the fact that it is created by persons with uniquely subjective outlooks on life makes it about the human experience.
The writer Leo Tolstoy, on the communicative nature of art:
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movement, line, color, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling–this is the activity of art.
Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
