What is Art?
The next basic assumption to look at, is, "What is Art?"
Let us have as a basic definition: art expresses our humanness. When we make a work, we intentionally combine a medium's elements into a compositional arrangement that engages an audience's aesthetic perceptions for the idea/emotion we want to convey. This is more than self-expression because we must make our work in such a way that an audience will stop to experience it.
Art expresses its maker's intention, either successfully or unsuccessfully. In the broadest sense, the term “express” communicates people’s purposeful emotions, passions, ideas, visions, pictures, movements and stories through a medium, for an audience. “Art is Expression” [i] encapsulates the belief Art communicates experiences artistically to others and we, as audience, perceive the Art experience aesthetically. Even though ‘Art Expresses,’ not every product-expression has enough substance in it to be “Art.” Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) stated, “Just at this time it may be well to remember that ‘every form of artistic activity is not art.’”[ii]
What is the difference in substance between the product that is “Art” and not “Art?” We usually distinguish the difference easily but cannot explain how we know it. Part of the problem of defining “art,” it is an activity of doing, that brings ideas into a form people may experience. The result of this bringing forth, i.e. the work, is what is talked about and classified.
Sometimes, a maker’s idea has not moved beyond self-expression to communicate an idea as an experience, we recognize something is lacking in the work’s communication and presentation. The label we commonly use is “Bad Art”. We readily observe works that lack something in how ideas are presented, or rather not presented well, as in poor performances.
Art provides experiences through a work. Bad art is art because it provides an experience, though it is a poor one, which we dismiss. When ideas and experiences are intentionally arranged and encapsulated well, we label it as “Good Art.”
Then beyond a work that just communicates an experience, when a work, as a result of its element’s relationships, expresses and communicates its idea’s magnitude significantly to the majority, we recognize the work becomes “Art,” with a capital “A,” as its significance is generally obvious (because whose definition we use does not matter, it is noticeably evident).
Another way to think about it, works that are filled with vitality, continue to draw and touch audiences, even centuries later.
[i] Gabo, Naum, “The Constructive Idea in Art,” reproduced in Modern Artists on Art, p. 112, “Art derives from the necessity to communicate and to announce. The stimulus of Science is the deficiency of our knowledge. The stimulus of Art is the abundance of our emotions and our latent desires.”
And Josef Albers’ credo (reproduced in Modern Artists on Art, p. 86): “The origin of art: The discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect; The content of art: Visual formulation of our reaction to life; The measure of art: The ratio of effort to effect; The aim of art: Revelation and evocation of vision.”
[ii] Wright, Frank Lloyd, In the Cause of Architecture II, reprinted in Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Selected Writings (1894-1940), ed. by Gutheim, Fredrick, p. 46