On art

Art

Art means different things to different people. For the sake of argument on this page, art will not simply mean aesthetically-pleasing works! Instead, art will consist of the vehicle that conveys novel thought (through creative and novel forms) and/or breaking the fourth wall of the current milieu. Thus, art can look ugly, so long as it says something that nobody wanted to say, in ways nobody did, before. To call it "art", it has to take someone somewhere new!

Bearing the status of art

If a work merely "looks nice" and "took a lot of effort", but whose novelty of expression has worn off, it should no longer bear the "status of art". That piece of work often just becomes some "inspired" or "derivative" handiwork.

To take an example from cuisine, a layperson could cook a hamburger in an apartment kitchen. Yet, it does not achieve the status of "gourmet cooking" simply through aesthetic and hard work. If, and only if, the hamburger contains an outside-the-box attribute that gives off a resounding "wow" or "whoa" to even the pickiest eater, then that hamburger deserves the title of "gourmet".

Likewise, in art, the piece of work must convey something novel or bend a rule in a way that seemed previously impossible.

So, we could consider the works of Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol artists of their time because they brought something new to the table when they debuted. It also formed their artistic alphabet, i.e. the set of symbols which defined their "brand".

Caveat: their later works may not constitute "art" if they simply no longer bring any of the aforementioned sense of innovation. Over time, anyone who copies their style, should definitely not receive the title of "artist" for they merely perform the ritual of handiwork.

One may like a band's "second album" the most because it made the band stand out and define their artistic alphabet. (Their "first album" merely served to get their name out there!) However, if their subsequent albums sound very similar to their second album, then those subsequent albums fail to achieve that "art" status. They failed to take me somewhere new!

When looking at a work of art, its creation date matters substantially. If someone painted something in (current year) that looks like a (19th century artist), one should write it off as a mere derivative handiwork. Yet, if someone were to have painted that kind of painting in an earlier time, that person then deserves the title of an artist.

Art as experimentation

Art, thus, has that sense of experimentation. The experiment had assembled together a combination or a compilation that nobody had previously envisioned. Of course, the trick lies in determining the difference between art and handiwork, as what "seems new at the time" might become subject to debate.

A rabbit hole arises where one needs to research further ad nauseam: Did they really copy that style from someone who copied from someone else? Did "Creator X" really do that before anyone else? The further we go back into the past, the worse it gets, as we can attest from the sketchiness of record-keeping of bygone centuries.

We can only look at the current candidates. We could only use our sentiments to determine if a candidate makes the cut, judging by whether they take us to aesthetic territories that we have never before seen.

Others may still have a more "mainstream" definition of art: something that took lots of effort. Yet that rules out those experiments that seemingly took little to no effort, but changed the game forever, as we can attest from the black square of suprematism.

Summary

• A definition of art as a novel form of expression, not just expression itself
  • Even this can suffer a problematic arbitrariness as we determine the originality of a piece of work
• Novel forms of expression can come from experimentation
• Mainstream definitions of art confuse handiwork (in worse cases, mere grunt work) with the definition of art posed in this article