Forums → WEPR → What is Art?

For just a moment, I think it would be nice if we could take a break from the futile 'debates' raging within the more frustrating topics to think about art once again. This time I want to ask the much broader question of what is it that makes something art. And furthermore, what is it that distinguishes good art from bad art?

These are deep, and difficult questions often sidestepped by a lazy sort of relativism. Today, a lot of people believe that art is what ever an artist happens to create. In addition to begging the question, this approach falls prey to a lapse in logic, since certainly the baker bakes cakes, but cakes are not what ever the baker bakes. We would be hardly be convinced by the baker's insistence that he has baked us is a cake if what he presents us with is a muffin or a baked rodent..or something not edible at all. We know what these things are without needing to be told by someone with the appropriate credentials. Sometimes an artist creates something that some critics might reject as art, and usually they give their reasons. Can you think of anything a self-styled artist might create as "art" that you might have difficulty accepting as art? Why or why not?

Usually we are able to recognize supposed works of art as art without knowing anything about an artist, or even being told that that person who created it is a artist. But it's the exceptions that makes things interesting to think about and may shed some light on the investigation. Arthur Danto asks us to consider the example of indiscernables - objects that are visually indistinguishable from one another, yet one is art and one is not. This is more plausible if we think about the avant-garde sort of modern art, than anything else. Already, certain assumptions about what art underpin this hypothetical situation, which people can take issue with, but it may be worthwhile to temporarily accept them for the sake of argument. Precisely what art is then becomes less about the intrinsic properties of the artwork and more about what it is "about".

I believe that art is a contextual entity in that it is exists as a medium of expression from artist to viewer. Although art doesn't have to be placed in an art gallery as a prerequisite to become art, this can set the proper context for the art to be regarded as art. While a twisted hunk of metal found in the trash is meaningless, an identical-looking piece of metal meticulously crafted by the artist could be about the torments of the industrial age. Of course the artist could attempt to express this idea through words, but art has certain elements or attributes which make it ideal for expressing certain kinds of ideas, such as those that words cannot do proper justice to, or those that must be more viscerally experienced to be adequately understood. One such element of art that I think is particularly important and certainly cannot be reduced to words is style. An artist's style imprints itself onto his work much like a signature, but one that tells us something about the artist's subjective impression of an idea that will be different from another person's impression of that same idea. In this way, the form of expression is one that is exclusively their own, and viewers of art may more compelled or inspired by one 'take' than another. I dare say that the work of art that is more convincing at portraying the lonely isolation of a soul caught amid the endless expanses of the ocean is better than another work of art that aims to do the same but where the viewer is only able take home the message that the color of the ocean matches the sky and it looks as if someone is going on a journey by sea.