If it ain’t art, don’t call it art
Here are some things that are not art forms: pitching, cooking, teaching, engineering, fishing, farming, parenting, managing, coaching, conversation, seduction, karate, carpentry, nursing, disk-jockeying, editing, belching, annoying people, grooming dogs, bar-tending, Scrabble, boxing, cobbling and surgery. Have I offended anyone? If so, why?
Here’s the thing that they teach you in linguistics courses: The dictionary doesn’t dictate how people should talk, it records how they do talk. The first OED was built out of slips of paper sent to Oxford from around England with people’s definitions of words scrawled on them. Definitions shift all of the time. If you look at a dictionary from, maybe, a century ago, you will see many differences between its definitions and those in current dictionaries. “Broadcasting,” for instance, used to be what you did with seeds, not with a radio. To a farmer of the past, radio broadcasting would have been quite an unwieldy concept.
What I want to know is why the word “art” became a compliment. Really, it shouldn’t have. We need to revert a little.
Probably, the use of the word as a compliment comes out of our respect for art and for those who make it. Since many place art among the highest of human endeavors, we steal its name and apply it to things and abilities we respect — or that simply astonish us: “Juggling knives is an art!” But, see, to me that’s cheap and it cheats the very thing we respect out of its individuality. It’s like stealing your next door neighbor’s plants to make your house look prettier. Clearly, you respect your neighbor’s taste, so it’s a kind of compliment, but that doesn’t change the fact that, now, your neighbor’s house looks drab.
So, maybe we can come up with a different way to compliment, say, a brilliant archer, than by saying his shooting is an art. Because it ain’t, no matter how awe-inspiring it might be.
To me, the best definition of art comes from Suzanne K. Langer, in Problems of Art. The book is based on her many lectures and this is only an article, so I won’t try to flesh it all out, but I think it is enough to explain that Langer says the artist creates “virtual” products — a kind of illusion packed with intellectual and emotional content. A composer creates “virtual time;” a painter, “virtual space,” etc. These illusions communicate emotions to the “audience” of the piece. One key is that the “parts” the artist uses (paints on a canvas, for instance) don’t physically make up a concrete thing the way, for example, a shoe is made up of leather, glue, nails and string. The painter’s pigments make up an illusion of space: water lilies on a pond, for instance. Virtual space.
Okay, so, you are either ready to stop reading or you are deeply intrigued by Langer’s ideas. But the point is, this is not what the people listed in paragraph one do. They may be masters of their fields. They may be innovators and geniuses, but they are not artists. And this is okay. For a surgeon not to be an artist is no crime. If I’m dying of a heart condition, Maya Angelou is of no immediate use to me. Bring me Dr. Cutwell!
Let’s also not slip the other way, though. Nothing is worse than someone saying a painting or a piece of music they despise “isn’t art.” It is art, (double-meaning alert) whether you like it or not. Gregorian chant, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, John Cage, Springsteen, NWA, The Beastie Boys, Metallica, Cher, Taylor Swift — all “art.” Whether you think some of these stink and some of these are brilliant doesn’t enter into it. If you want to call it shit, call it shit. But an apple is still an apple, even if it is mealy, rotten or bland.
How important is this little linguistic glitch in the development of the world? Maybe very important. The human animal is capable of innumerable achivements. We are already at a point where the individual is disappearing. It is hard to name inventors of new things the way we can pin down the old giants like Franklin and Edison. Innovators are being swallowed by the collective efforts of humankind. Let’s not let language steer our individual genres of endeavor into the same nebula. Let’s not bleed art into science and science into art and athletics into science and round and round. I think every discipline deserves its own self-esteem-building terms.
We artists will just have to settle with “great,” if we can ever get to it.
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The word “art” derives from the Latin “ars, artis,” meaning craft or skill. There is an art to French cooking. The phrase “medical arts” has a long pedigree. I would agree that a carpenter, however skillful, is best thought of as a craftsman, but to confine the term to the so-called fine arts seems unwarranted to me, especially given that much of what is passed off as art these days displays little or no skill or craft at all.
Acting isn’t an art, either:
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/131462-a-cambodian-odyssey/
Frank, while there is an art to French cooking, can we agree that at the end of the day, what the chef has produced isn’t art, but dinner?
Part of me feels like you’re arguing for the revival of the distinct definitions of High Art (fine art) vs. “non-art,” by which most folks mean low art. If the only art one can acknowledge is Art, then of course it follows that only fine art is Art. That’s problematic on many levels, not just the definitional, because it recycles some very old cultural stereotypes. Frank is correct to point out the root-word of “art,” which also means “artifice.” Art is always made, always artifice, always artificial.
The word nobody’s mentioned here, since we’re getting hung up on linguistics, which lies at the root of the confusion is “creativity.” You can argue that cooking is not an Art, but I don’t think you can argue that cooking is not creative. There’s an entire industry of cookbook publishing, not to mention the recipes themselves, that is intensely creative. Contrary to popular belief, creativity is not a scarce resource; it pops up everywhere. Lots of people who don’t think of themselves as artists, such as most chefs, still exhibit high levels of creativity.
So we can say that those things like Scrabble aren’t art, sure. But they can involve high levels of creativity, intuition, and experience—which are also facets of art-making.
Art, it’s clear that Chris is not talking about high art vs. low art. He says as much explicitly, devoting a paragraph to it:
“Let’s also not slip the other way, though. Nothing is worse than someone saying a painting or a piece of music they despise “isn’t art.” It is art, (double-meaning alert) whether you like it or not. Gregorian chant, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, John Cage, Springsteen, NWA, The Beastie Boys, Metallica, Cher, Taylor Swift — all “art.” Whether you think some of these stink and some of these are brilliant doesn’t enter into it. If you want to call it shit, call it shit. But an apple is still an apple, even if it is mealy, rotten or bland.”
Art, that many human (and maybe other animal) endeavors require creativity, and often a high degree of creativity, is easy to agree with, but “art” is not equivalent to “creativity.” If it is, then nearly everything we do is art and nearly everyone is an artist. Which is another way of saying that nothing is art and no one is an artist. There is obviously lots of room for discussion about what art is, who’s an artist, all that, and plenty of gray areas even were we to agree on some definition (which I have no interest in hashing out here), but whatever different opinions people might have about that subject, Chris seems to me to simply be pointing out that if we use the words “art” and “artist” to describe everything and everyone, we have made them meaningless.
Gentlemen — Scott’s right: there is a lot of room for discussion, more appropriately over drinks on a long night. A great deal of this depends on my readers agreeing with me that Professor Langer had it right. Her definition, to me, it the most effective attempt in philosophy of boiling down art to its essential differences from artisanship and other creative endeavors. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on that.
Frank, one of the points I tried to make is that definition and derivation need to be ignored on this one; even reversed. Tracing verbal pedigrees doesn’t necessarily validate word usage. (“To starve” used to mean “to die of extreme cold”, in Anglo-Saxon.) And deciding “what is passed off as art” is exactly what I’m trying to make a case for avoiding. I’m the first one to condemn a piece of art to the junk heap if it stinks and shows no merit, but I just don’t think there is validity in saying it is not art, so long as it meets the criteria proposed by Langer, which are not evaluative of quality but meant only to define. There, however, is much validity in saying it is crappy art if it indeed, stinks.
Michael, I would argue that acting is an art in that the actor uses his materials (experience and verbal/physical expression) to create a “virtual person”. I don’t think interpretation and creativity are mutually exclusive.
Pedigree doesn’t validate usage any more or less than colloquialism does. Or doesn’t.
Are video games art? How about video gaming?
Don’t even get me f#cking started.
Oxford, just for fun:
noun
1 the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power:
the art of the Renaissance
great art is concerned with moral imperfections
she studied art in Paris
works produced by such skill and imagination:
his collection of modern art
an exhibition of Mexican art
[as modifier] :
an art critic
creative activity resulting in the production of paintings, drawings, or sculpture:
she’s good at art
2 (the arts) the various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance:
the visual arts
[in singular] :
the art of photography
3 (arts) subjects of study primarily concerned with the processes and products of human creativity and social life, such as languages, literature, and history (as contrasted with scientific or technical subjects):
the belief that the arts and sciences were incompatible
the Faculty of Arts
4 a skill at doing a specified thing , typically one acquired through practice:
the art of conversation
I would the creation of video games is art — lots of “virtuals” achieved through manipulations of materials both concrete and digital — but not gaming. Gaming is a skill and a derned fun one.
“I would SAY”. Sorry.