What is art?
Some may be annoyed with how vague this question is. But it is always important to remember, that first of all art is an English word, which consists out of three characters. As well as the concept it represents, this word has been formed with time purely by humans, therefore, if you are a human (no lizards involved, sorry), every answer might be counted as correct.
What is art, Carol? Renaissance sculptures.
What is art, Andy? My husband’s smile.
What is art, Jimmy? The way grass matches with the wall of my house.
What is art, Google? The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.
All answers are valid. “That’s not my opinion,”- my mom once said in the middle of the argument. –“That’s my worldview, you can’t argue with that.” And, though, I was quite annoyed in the moment, that’s an essential point while discussing words in English (or any other) alphabet. We can’t argue with Andy, who is in love, that smile can’t be art, because Google said, that art is supposed to be an application of human creative skill and imagination. In HIS worldview the meaning behind those three characters is smiling. And BEING THAT WAY FOR HIM from his perspective is just being.
So that might be where the annoyance with questions about words comes from. The inability to answer them no matter how smart and dedicated we are, cause there’s no way to make a concept universal, can become a demotivating factor. Asking is a waste of time if we can’t answer, right? I personally see a wrongful line of reasoning in this logic. The absence of universal answer is not an absence of an answer. If you ask me “What is the color of socks?” generally while sipping tea, my inability to answer simply “red” doesn’t mean, that socks do not exist or that there are no red socks in space-time continuum or that the question is unanswerable.
In my understanding of English and the world, art is a mirror. I don’t want to list all of the physical things art could be (like singing, drawing, writing), because that would take a while and also is useless in my discourse. The way we define art — always differently — reflects our worldviews as a society and as individuals unconditionally.
We invented words for objects around to communicate properly, to unify, to link objects to certain sounds going together so we would never bother to describe them again. Whereas words for amorphous concepts are empty inside and were created to be filled with personal meanings. When I ask “what is love?” I don’t care what love is universally, it wouldn’t give me any useful information. I do care, though, what love is universally for a specific person I am talking to (or society I am researching). Basically, vague concepts are just empty vessels we use to grasp the idea of how people around see things.
So art is just a reflecting mechanism to know more about yourself and other human beings. It carries no definition and all of the definitions at the same time, which never is a contradiction. Art is a library of mirrors we walk through, trying to see something besides ourselves in them.
And I do find beauty in this curiosity we all share as a species, and I do find asking an essential part of existence whether there’s an answer you like or not.
P.S. “what is a beauty” and “how to know if you exist” coming on Blu-ray
