What of the existential and quintessential question, what is art? Setting aside, for the moment at least, the facile option of “like pornography you know it when you see it,” I believe there are traits or markers that can be separated out from purely subjective notions and responses.
The difficulty is that art, almost by definition, is on the part of the artist quite personal and subjective. It is that person’s response (discounting the works produced by cats and elephants and similar endeavors) to his or her experience of something or someone, in their environment or outside it. It may be as spare as painting a black canvas or recording stillness in a pitch black room; or as extravagant as the installation of 3100 blue umbrellas in a valley in Japan. as Christo did the late 1980s. It is both expression and reception; exhibition and private prospecting. An audience can be empowering, gratifying, and essential to continued creation, but not always. Any number of poets, Emily Dickinson being the exemplar, have expressed themselves without a public or publication.
But if art is understood as an interaction or encounter between artist and viewer or listener or toucher, then an audience’s role in determining whether a creative work is art, and its power as art, is critical.
Must art be intentional? The pachyderm exercise notwithstanding, is a red maple leaf on a stone fence art? Or a pattern of aspen leaves on still water? Or the iridescent hues of a gas stain on wet pavement? On a garden path bordered by nepata, northern sea oats and coreopsis, we remark about the artful arrangement. And we may also do so crossing an alpine meadow or noticing reflections among lakeshore rocks. Is the difference in intention or outcome? If you believe in a Creator or universal force, then the meadow and lakeshore groupings in your view are just as intentional and uplifting as the perennials lining a garden path.
An audience, and for that matter an artist, may be critical to assessing something to be art, but outside our perception, or experience, or assessment, is it art? Or from a different angle, is art, as a principle, law, state, or force, reliant on our perception, participation and analysis? The paintbrush and columbine in that alpine meadow are in an arrangement by opportunity and environmental suitability, not so much design (except in the larger sense of creative processes being part of a universal design or intent). Temperature, humidity, viscosity, and electromagnetic attraction all play a part in determining the design of a snowflake, but outside our perception is this geometric rendering art? And if it is, then does art exist independent of our reception or perception? And going further, can there be art without an artist?
Word with Image 