What is Art?

I am going to attempt to define what art is for me, or more precisely what it is that the artist does. It seems that when I ask someone to define art they start to wax eloquent about personal expression and beauty and forms and shapes but never do I hear anything concrete. Some would say that the thing that makes art beautiful is precisely the fact that it escapes description. I would agree that why we like art is a mystery, but how we accomplish it isn't.

Put simply, I define the artist as one who organizes symbols or signs to create meaning. Art, then, is a particular arraignment of symbols or signs attempting to create meaning. The mystery of art for me is that as human beings we quickly give meanings to an arrangement of signs. I could draw three lines on different sheets of paper and they would mean nothing. I could draw the same three lines on the same piece of paper and you might see a face or a triangle or a representation of van Gogh's left ear.

As I have studied different types of art I have again and again noticed this pattern of meaning by association. The way cinema works is taking different pieces of film and putting them together and suddenly we have a story. You see a hand holding a gun, then a man sitting in a chair, then you see a door open and your mind will put the three unrelated pictures together and you will get the idea that you are about to see a murder. By selecting the images you see the editor of the movie has created a meaning out of unrelated pictures.

The actor does in the theater does much the same thing. Instead of putting pictures together the actor puts actions together. Lets say you saw an actor walk across the stage and pick up a book. Nothing remarkable there, but lets say the actor read a few words and then throws the book in the trash. There are endless possibilities of things that picking up a book could imply based on its context, instead of throwing the book away the actor could walk back across the stage and begin to make dinner.

I have begun to see this common line among all art. The artist organizes and edits what you see. The photographer decides what you will see in the picture. The movie director selects what will be in the frame. The painter combines shapes and colors in a particular order. One who draws is putting lines together. The musician puts notes together to create a song and the writer selects what words to use and in what order.

It is amazing to me how simply putting things next to each other creates meaning, that the difference between a good book and a mediocre one is not the words used, but their arrangement. Of all the arts my personal bias is for the art of words. For words are capable of the most amazing associations. When you stop to think what a metaphor is, it is nothing more than a bizarre organization. It is in metaphors where we find out that the truth is a knife, that pens are swords and that life is sweet.

I would argue that art at its core has never changed. Our style has changed but the essence of what we are doing has not. I get frustrated when people talk about one art form as more advanced than another or when someone says that this painting or this poem is very "modern" in a tone that implies that it is less "primitive" than others. For me there is no primitive art, just snobby artist. I don't deny that art has change or that is has developed, but the truth is that the mechanics are the same as ever. Maybe we have changed and art has remained the same.

 If art is not defined by its order, than order is at least a characteristic that defines art.   For me how art works isn't a mystery. But why it works? I don't know.



Photography by: Andrew McKeeth