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If it ain’t art, don’t call it art

Posted By Chris Matarazzo On In artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo,language & grammar | 9 Comments

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 [1] 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 [2]. 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.

CHRIS MATARAZZO’S ARTISITIC UNKNOWNS APPEARS EVERY TUESDAY

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Chris Matarazzo [6]

Chris Matarazzo is a writer, composer, musician and teacher of literature and writing on the college and high school levels. His music can be heard on his recent release, Hats and Rabbits [7], which is currently available. Chris is also the composer of the score to the off-beat independent film Surrender Dorothy [8] and he performs in the Philadelphia area with the King Richard Band. He's also a relatively prolific novelist, even if no one seems to care yet. His blog, also called Hats and Rabbits [9], is nice, too, if you get a chance...