What is Art
When asked “what is art?”, what comes to mind is a mural or an acrylic painting or an Italian sculpture of a nude male—things found in an art museum, a place which sort of hands the public a generally accepted definition of art: a physical something that can be hung up on a wall or propped up on a pedestal and be touched and felt and seen. In his book What is Art?, Leo Tolstoy states, “To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and…then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling—this is the activity of art.” Art embodies the things that aren’t so straightforwardly obvious—a string of words pieced together in a T.S. Eliot poem, the calculated technique of a ballet routine, a sequence of notes in a Beethoven sonata. Art is creativity poured into any chosen outlet. The form in which art manifests itself is not important; it is the meaning behind the work that makes art, art.
Art does not have to be aesthetically appealing or elaborate by any means, so long as the message behind it provides a skeleton to hold it up and give it reason to exist. Art can be an everyday object, even, so long as there is a purpose behind it. American sculptor Robert Gober is known to create domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs. In his exhibition at the MOMA, there are five sinks all untitled and dating three years into the AIDS epidemic, each of them “missing faucets, drains and pipes, and hanging low, which accentuates their dual role: simultaneously sinks whose lack of plumbing renders the act of cleansing impossible, and implied tombs or columbaria — death as a hole in need of filling.” A sink is not art, but a sculpted sink teeming with meaning and personal motifs is a place where creativity and emotion has been funneled into, and that is what makes it art.
Writers use words just as a painter uses oils or a sculptor uses clay. While a writer’s story is not in physical form—something you can see outright—it exists in the mind and gives the audience the task of mapping out the picture themselves; the reader’s mind is the writer’s canvas. Normal prose, written in online forums and blogs, or even newspaper articles, are not art. What makes something art is the recurring motifs, themes, symbols, and imagery throughout. The lines of this essay, for instance, are not considered art; they do not mean anything, they only exist for the sake of an explanation and ultimately, a grade. However, a novel such as The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger utilizes symbolism to weave a deeper meaning into its storyline, employing images like mummies and curse words written on walls as metaphors for something deeper: a child’s desperately futile desire to remain a child. Salinger’s mummies and are like Gober’s sinks in that their outward appearances give little indication of what is lying beneath. They do not exist for the sake of existing; they exist to convey messages.
It is comfortable to define art as the tangible, something you can skim your fingers over, something that evokes an emotional or visceral reaction, that looks how we have been trained to believe art is supposed to look. The word “art” is incredibly short given the broad scope of things it covers, from movement to sound to images and kitchen sinks. It is the outlet that bottled-up creativity is funneled into, and the way in which the artist chooses to express himself has no bearing on the fact that what they are doing is considered art—given it has a purpose. What one might see or feel through it may vary among audience members; some may find beauty, some may feel repulsed, others may feel nothing. The artist’s intentions by putting their work out in the world are what ultimately allow something to be considered art.
When asked “what is art?”, what comes to mind is a mural or an acrylic painting or an Italian sculpture of a nude male—things found in an art museum, a place which sort of hands the public a generally accepted definition of art: a physical something that can be hung up on a wall or propped up on a pedestal and be touched and felt and seen. In his book What is Art?, Leo Tolstoy states, “To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and…then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling—this is the activity of art.” Art embodies the things that aren’t so straightforwardly obvious—a string of words pieced together in a T.S. Eliot poem, the calculated technique of a ballet routine, a sequence of notes in a Beethoven sonata. Art is creativity poured into any chosen outlet. The form in which art manifests itself is not important; it is the meaning behind the work that makes art, art.
Art does not have to be aesthetically appealing or elaborate by any means, so long as the message behind it provides a skeleton to hold it up and give it reason to exist. Art can be an everyday object, even, so long as there is a purpose behind it. American sculptor Robert Gober is known to create domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs. In his exhibition at the MOMA, there are five sinks all untitled and dating three years into the AIDS epidemic, each of them “missing faucets, drains and pipes, and hanging low, which accentuates their dual role: simultaneously sinks whose lack of plumbing renders the act of cleansing impossible, and implied tombs or columbaria — death as a hole in need of filling.” A sink is not art, but a sculpted sink teeming with meaning and personal motifs is a place where creativity and emotion has been funneled into, and that is what makes it art.
Writers use words just as a painter uses oils or a sculptor uses clay. While a writer’s story is not in physical form—something you can see outright—it exists in the mind and gives the audience the task of mapping out the picture themselves; the reader’s mind is the writer’s canvas. Normal prose, written in online forums and blogs, or even newspaper articles, are not art. What makes something art is the recurring motifs, themes, symbols, and imagery throughout. The lines of this essay, for instance, are not considered art; they do not mean anything, they only exist for the sake of an explanation and ultimately, a grade. However, a novel such as The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger utilizes symbolism to weave a deeper meaning into its storyline, employing images like mummies and curse words written on walls as metaphors for something deeper: a child’s desperately futile desire to remain a child. Salinger’s mummies and are like Gober’s sinks in that their outward appearances give little indication of what is lying beneath. They do not exist for the sake of existing; they exist to convey messages.
It is comfortable to define art as the tangible, something you can skim your fingers over, something that evokes an emotional or visceral reaction, that looks how we have been trained to believe art is supposed to look. The word “art” is incredibly short given the broad scope of things it covers, from movement to sound to images and kitchen sinks. It is the outlet that bottled-up creativity is funneled into, and the way in which the artist chooses to express himself has no bearing on the fact that what they are doing is considered art—given it has a purpose. What one might see or feel through it may vary among audience members; some may find beauty, some may feel repulsed, others may feel nothing. The artist’s intentions by putting their work out in the world are what ultimately allow something to be considered art.