What is Art? A Definition

That is what art should be. Passion. To truly appreciate something astonishing of artistic quality means it was probably created with feverous intent. That is what distinguishes the artisan from the artist, one has skill in the work and the other has a frenzied need to create or act. So much can be said to be a work of art that the word continues to lose any tangible meaning or potency. Yet that is the infinite function that makes art such an integral expression of the human condition. For as long as the human species is challenged or bored, they have and forever will create what's on their mind. The mental construct of art allows us to create artistic things, but also to perceive art, even in nature as in the beauty of a spider's web.

One Buddhist definition of art reads, "Art is the organisation of sense impressions [into pleasurable formal relations] that expresses the artist's sensibility and communicates to his audience a sense of values that can transform their lives." This is close to what Leo Tolstoy claimed art ought to be in his essay, What Is Art? (1897), that art must create en emotional connection between the artist and the audience. French artist, Edgar Degas would probably agree, as he said "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." Though, this requires that an audience, of either one or many, must have a reaction to the created piece of art in question. Perhaps the definition of what art is can be detached even further from these scholarly definitions into an essentially pure form of personal expression without any necessary consequence of whether the rest of the human race has any reaction to it. This could easily be an Aristotelian view of art, as part of Aristotle's philosophical view on what art is requires only that it have a maker, as it is something that cannot make itself.

The word itself is daunting because once it is used to reference physical matter, then that piece of matter takes on egocentric form and it is knighted from "thing" to "art." So then we have a swarming mass of people that become art snobs (for lack of a better word), saying this is art and this is not. Or worse still, saying what art ought and ought not to be. Unless this "snob" is taking the effort to help others understand their artistic perception, then enforcing an opinion is completely wrong. We do not want others to form a perception of art that is based solely on opinion or taste. For the child who has scribbled a twisted rainbow of crayon on the wall may be no less passionate than the man who has studied a craft his entire life. As Pablo Picasso once said, "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up..." Though, even in old age the artist may remain, where an old homeless man banging buckets with spoons needs his art no less than the prodigy who performs for royalty.

This is where art begins; born of the need to quench an idea that burns inside the mind. Whether the origin of that idea is known or not to the creator is irrelevant. What makes it art foremost is the primal need to evolve an emotion into expression. What is your definition of art?

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