What is art? Why is art?

What is art? If you ask 5 staff members at the Metropolitan Museum, they’ll give you 5 different definitions. Same thing if you ask 5 professors who teach art history. (This essay is a combination of 2 essays in the Art History through Innovators: Sculpture series, which begins here.)

It’s not an easy question, so let’s start with the basics. Look at this logo.

• Do you know who that is?
• Do you know what he’s doing?
• Is he good, bad, or mediocre at what he does?
• How did he get that way: skill, practice, luck, transcendental meditation?

If you recognize this figure as Michael Jordan, then the image carries with it a set of ideas about excellence, and about how you achieve excellence. That’s why Nike uses it as a logo.

Sculptures carry ideas with them, too. For example, look at Michelangelo’s David.

What do you see in this sculpture? Most people see a combination of courage, strength, and alertness.

Now: think about this for a moment from the artist’s point of view. Artworks often endure for centuries — but artists never do. That means an artist can’t sculpt an image of every single thing he sees, or every random idea he imagines. Nor can he include every microscopic detail of what he does choose to sculpt. He has to choose his subjects and his style based on what matters enough to him — what’s important enough to him — to spend days, months, or years working on.

So by showing courage, strength, and alertness in a work of art, Michelangelo says: “These things are important to me.” A sculptor who represents Uncle Dave drinking beer in a La-Z-Boy reveals a different set of values.

In either case, when the artist creates his work of art, he tells you: “This is important, this matters, pay attention to this — this value, this idea, this action.” Sometimes it’s this kind of place, this sort of person, this kind of feeling. But it’s always something the artist considers profoundly important.

What is a major innovation in art?

To convey his idea of what’s important, an artist must be able to communicate with you. That means, first, that he has to capture your attention — he can’t communicate with you if your brain is channel-surfing.

Then he has to show you something you can understand — he can’t communicate without a common language.

He has to show you something so unusual or so vivid that it makes you stand still and contemplate what he has created. As soon as you move on to another artwork, the sculptor has lost his chance to communicate with you.

In short, a sculptor has to make you, his audience, stop, look, and think about his work of art.

The innovations we look at in Art History through Innovators: Sculpture are not novelty for the sake of novelty. Every one of them gave its creator more power to make you stop, look, and think. And these innovations were not gimmicks or minor tweaks. They were so effective that they allowed many other sculptors to convey their values and ideas more effectively. By my count, there are only 10 such innovations.

What does art do for you?

But what does art do for you, as a viewer?

Well, if you can pass a particular sculpture without a second glance, then that sculpture does nothing for you. What I’m talking about here is art that makes you stand still and look — art that makes you, personally, react strongly — art that you can picture in your mind long after you’re out of sight of it — art that gives you chills and flashbacks. I’ve occasionally come around the corner in a museum and seen a sculpture that made me forget to breathe. If you’ve never had that experience in front of a work of art … then, honey, you need to get out and look at more art.

Art with that sort of impact on you is the kind I’m talking about in this section.

If you, personally, react very positively to a work of art, that means there’s something about it that you, personally, consider important. If you love Polycleitus’s victorious athlete (Part 4), you might share Polycleitus’s view that victory is possible and that winning is better than losing. Or you might love the beauty of a symmetrical, muscular male body. If you love the Sleeping Eros (Part 7), you may have a soft spot for children, or for one specific child. If you love the bronze dancer (Part 8), you might love the mystery of her, or the grace, or the way she carries a faint echo of music.

The sight or the memory of a sculpture that you react to so strongly brings along with it the values or ideas that you associate with that work. It gives you a split-second reminder of what matters to you. It’s like a signpost on the highway of life. As you’re zooming along at 60 miles per hour, it won’t tell you where you want to go or why you decided to go there. But it can help keep you heading toward your chosen destination.

Michelangelo’s David won’t teach you how to think, or how to be courageous, or even how to get buff. But the sight or the memory of the David can help you remember that an active mind in a strong body is a wonderful thing, and that some things are worth fighting for.

Words … are wonderful things. I’m extravagantly, exorbitantly, exuberantly fond of words. But it takes time and effort to process words. A painting or a sculpture reminds you in a split second of what’s important to you. You just look at it — you just contemplate it — and a cascade of ideas comes with it. That’s why Nike shoes have that silhouette of Michael Jordan on them, not a few well-chosen lines from one of Jordan’s speeches.

And that’s why representational art has been around for millennia, and why its variety is as great as the variety of human beings. Visual art doesn’t replace all those lovely words. It summarizes them — condenses them into a convenient package that you can easily call to mind.

Ayn Rand’s theory of art

If you’ve read Ayn Rand on esthetics, you’ll recognize that I’ve been paraphrasing her definition of art:

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.

When I say an artist shows what he considers important, I’m talking about what Rand refers to as “metaphysical value-judgments.” When I say that art’s function is to show you a condensed version of what’s important to you, I’m paraphrasing and simplifying her statement that

Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art … tells man, in effect, which aspects of his experience are to be regarded as essential, significant, important.

If you’re curious about Rand’s theory of art, try her collection of essays, The Romantic Manifesto, supplemented by the chapter on art in Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Rand’s writing on esthetics concentrate on literature. My own writings focus on the visual arts. A couple years ago I wrote a book called Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide. In it I described 54 remarkable sculptures in Manhattan, but I also took the chance to tackle a lot of questions that intrigued me. For instance: why can two people react so differently to the same work of art? How do you discover and state the theme or message of an artwork: what the artist considered important? Is there an objective way to evaluate art?

If such questions interest you, pick up a copy of Outdoor Monuments. I’ve also published many other books and essays on art: see the Essays page on my website, ForgottenDelights.com.