What is Art?

(Note: I suppose I should post some thought or other before I can reasonably expect any comment. I wrote this in college, more years ago than I care to admit or even contemplate.)

Art is the legacy of the human race. Art is the creative output of one culture that is deemed worth keeping by successor cultures. Art is virtually the only thing a society or culture can produce that will be valued, cherished, and preserved by succeeding cultures. Art, therefore, must be judged ultimately for its intrinsic value as an heirloom of humanity. This value is based on three vital dimensions which I call Craft, Spirit, and Permanence. The dimension of Spirit can be divided into two elements which I call Presence and Tone.

Art is the attempt to express a human spiritual or emotional response to the world through a medium that can be perceived by others. The Spirit of a work of art, the essence of this emotional response that motivates the artist to expressive efforts, defines both the Presence and Tone of the work.

Craft is the method and medium of expression and it varies widely. The artistic impulse can be expressed in the graphic crafts such as painting and drawing, or in three-dimensional crafts like sculpture or architecture or the design and ornamentation of useful and decorative objects. Artistic expression can be made in the linguistic crafts of literature, the sonic crafts of music, and the corporal crafts of acting and dance. Both composition and performance are equally valid means of expression of the artistic response. No craft is inherently superior to another.

Craft and Spirit are equally essential to any work deserving a place in the human legacy. Virtuosity of Craft alone is mere glamour. Spirit poorly expressed—or worse, unexpressed—is a tragic waste. Craft without Spirit is sterile. Spirit without Craft is stillborn.

Craft
Craft is what most people think of when they hear the word “art.” It is the learned skill of manipulating a medium in order to express the artistic impulse. It is the adroitness of the painter with a brush and pigment. It is the practiced hand of the concert violinist. It is the richness in the poet’s choice of word and meter.

Any craft is a learned skill. All normal human beings can learn to perform every human endeavor, including all of the artistic crafts, if they pay the price in time and effort to master that endeavor. Talent, a natural proclivity for a craft, is the discount God gives certain individuals on the price they must pay to master their craft. Talent can diminish the cost to achieve greatness, but rarely to a miraculous degree. With a sufficient commitment of time and labor, anyone can learn the rules of composition or how to string words together in iambic pentameter.

Superb craftsmanship can be very impressive. And yet, without Spirit, it is ultimately shallow and of lesser worth than true art.

Spirit
Spirit in art is the ability to evoke an emotional response, to somehow move the soul of the participant. The Spirit of a work of art begins with the depth and sincerity of feeling within the artist’s soul when embarking on its creation. The artist’s soul is moved first by a desire to create, then is moved by a sense of beauty or pathos or fascination or rage during the process of creation.

Yet if this were as far as the Spirit in a work of art went, the work would be essentially worthless to humanity as a whole. The ability to evoke a response in a participant other than the artist is the quality called Presence.

Presence
Presence itself is subdivided into two elements: Intensity and Universality.

Intensity is the degree to which a work of art can move the soul of the beholder. A work of art that moves you deeply has a greater intrinsic worth than one that just nudges you a little.

Universality is the measure of how broadly the presence of a work of art can be felt through the whole human community. Some art is so esoteric that only a few initiates are sufficiently educated to be appreciably moved. Ultimately, such art is of lesser value as an heirloom of the species than a work that has the power to affect a broad cross-section of people.

Tone
Tone is the direction in which the soul is moved. The entire range of human feeling can be evoked by art. Art that moves the soul toward feelings of beauty, serenity, or reverence is of greater intrinsic worth to humanity than art which moves the soul toward feelings of sorrow, anger, or horror. Works which incite the soul toward wickedness has no value whatsoever.

Permanence
Certain forms of art, usually related to the performance crafts, are ephemeral in nature. They may exhibit miraculous craftsmanship, they may have a profound presence and a glorious tone, but when they end they are gone. They cannot directly become a permanent part of the human legacy. Lives may be touched and altered, but this indirect effect of the work fades to almost nothing within a generation. This lack of permanence diminishes the intrinsic value of the work.

If the performance is recorded, then the work is as permanent as the recording medium. If there is a core work of composition at the root of the performance, such as a script, score, or choreography, then permanence is enhanced. Indeed, such works can be numbered among the most priceless gems of the human legacy because to the Craft and Spirit of the core can be added the Craft and Spirit of a thousand different performances.

Conclusion
The intrinsic value of art as human legacy can then be perceived on a sort of multi-dimensional spectrum. For example, a slap-dash sofa painting* of mediocre Craft and no Spirit is of lesser value than a textbook sonnet with perfect rhyme and meter, but still no Spirit. Likewise, an abstract painting that is a marvel of composition and color but can move only a select few aficionados is of lesser worth to humanity than a simple, pure melody that affects nearly everyone who hears it. And finally, a film that fills multitudes with a sense of pathos is ultimately of lesser worth than a sculpture whose sheer beauty ennobles the souls of all who see it.

This approach to judging the value of a work of art as an heirloom of humanity has a weakness. A simple-minded application of the “80/20 rule” would lead us to expect that roughly 80% of the creative output of any given culture will not be deemed worth keeping by successor cultures. In other words, most of what is produced and called “art” is sufficiently lacking in at least one of the dimensions described above to be filtered out of the human treasury over the course of time. But the culture that produces the “art” lacks the perspective of the successor cultures and keeps most everything. We do not have the opportunity to truly appreciate our own greatest treasures because they are lost amid the background noise of the mediocre and the worthless.

The advent of art history as an academic discipline over the last century and a half, and the resulting explosion of museums have exacerbated this problem. Art scholars and museum curators want to keep almost everything from the creative output to preserve the integrity of the historic record. That means museums are preserving the junk as well as the gems. Admittedly, to the scholar the junk is as educational as the gems, but to display the junk with the gems in public museums and to call it all “art” is deceptive.

Art museums (and symphony orchestras for that matter) might do well to take a lesson from Natural History museums. The basements of Natural History museums are overflowing with specimens that provide invaluable information to natural history scholars, but the public display galleries include only those pieces that have the power to move the average human being to a sense of awe and wonder.

Art scholarship has had another adverse affect on artistic output. For obvious reasons, most art scholarship focuses on an analysis of Craft. Spirit is awfully hard to pin down in an academic paper, but the question of how colors or sounds relate to one another in an artistic composition provides endless matter for analysis and argument. Thus we have seen an increasing exploration of the dissected elements of every craft become the glaring focus of much of our creative output.

For example, Hans Hofmann’s focus on color or Jackson Pollack’s focus on “action” have produced works prized by scholars, museums, and those who wish to be perceived as “with it,” but which, frankly, lack Universality and have a Presence achieved mostly by sheer scale.

Furthermore, the scholar’s need to limit collecting to only “representative” pieces has led to the dread among artists of doing what has been done before. If your work is representative only of yourself, then you are apt to get collected. Again, universality suffers.

In the end, we are blinded by the immediacy of our own culture. It remains to be seen which gems from our prodigious creative output will be deemed worth keeping by successor cultures.

*A uniquely American phenomenon, a sofa painting is a work purchased in a furniture store because the colors match the sofa.

© 2008 by The Watcher. All rights reserved.