Art

I don’t know what art is.

As much as I’ve tried to keep it short, this is a long post. I might say at the outset that I am not trying to discredit art or artists here, just consider an angle on the subject.

During my time as a photographer I came across several magazine articles, and even a TV documentary, which asked whether photography could be defined as an art form. The most interesting thing I got from them was the fact that nobody could come up with a universally accepted definition of ‘art.’ Somebody eventually stated the obvious: there isn’t one. We all know it exists, but we all have our own ideas as to what is and isn’t art – and those ideas are rarely better than vague when we really get down to it. And so I dislike the term, and I rarely use the related adjective ‘artistic.’ I prefer ‘creative,’ since that is at least based on a verb with a universally accepted definition.

I’ve considered this question in relation to the two ‘creative’ endeavours that have been important to me during large periods of my life – photography and the writing of fiction. I see no difficulty in regarding both as creative, since they both brought into being something that wasn’t there before. But so does the building of a wall, and we don’t generally use the term for that activity. So what’s the difference? Well, I suppose walls are essentially practical things that are usually there to perform a function. Photographs and stories are meant to get into the mind and inform it in some way, or at least evoke some sort of emotional response. Does that make them art? I don’t know because it comes back to the definition, and I don’t know what the definition is. My own feelings on the matter are far too vague to be of any use, and I end up concluding that it doesn’t matter in the least whether I or anybody else chooses to apply the term. What is is; it doesn’t matter what you call it.

But it does seem to matter to a lot of people, especially a lot of artists. They see it as something grand, the pinnacle of achievement, the best label you can have. I worked with a good many of them during my time at the theatre, and I observed this to be true. Some of them used the term ‘my art’ in the same way that the worst sort of thespian used to talk of ‘my public.’ It’s just another way of saying ‘I’m special.’ I found it so disquieting that I even came to thoroughly dislike the term ‘my work,’ but maybe that’s going a bit too far. Maybe I’ve become an inverted art snob. But maybe not, because I also have no time for people who refuse to recognise anything as art unless it’s either a pretty picture or something the more catholic end of the culture tells them is art. If art is to have any meaning at all, there always has to be an avant garde.

There is a little aside to this discussion. Any definition of art has to have something to do with communicating aspects of the reality in which we function. Furthermore, it needs to give the recipient something they didn’t have before. And in that, at least, I realise how limited both fiction and photography are.

No amount or arrangement of words can evoke in a reader an emotion or sensation with which he is completely unfamiliar. You can construct a whole novel or play around the destructive effects of jealousy, for example, but nothing you can write will make the recipient know what it feels like to be jealous if they’ve never felt it.

Similarly, all visual forms – photography or any other – are restricted by scale, dimensionality and context. They can only represent a reduced version of the reality they purport to represent, never the real thing. ‘Art mirrors life’ is a well-chosen axiom, but I suspect a mirror is all it can be – or maybe a signpost showing where to look for the real thing. I really don’t know. Do you?

If anybody wants to read an artist’s view on this subject, see Kaetlyn’s blog here.