introduction
A pile of bananas, a messy bed and a shark in a box. Art? Well according to my trusty dictionary, art is defined as, 'the creation of works of beauty or other special significance', simple as. To my mind a pile of bananas in Trafalgar Square is neither beautiful nor specially significant so it's not art, end of.
The problem is of course that, despite appearances to the contrary, my opinion is not definitive. There are about six billion people in the world, so there are bound to be plenty who utterly disagree and consider that big yellow mess to be a work of art. This is the ultimate folly of trying to define this annoying little word, any definition is almost always subjective.
Having said this, we quite happily officially define things as not being art. Porn, for example, is legally defined as something that contains graphic sexual references but has no artistic merit. Graffiti, street art or social menace? Last summer the whole frontage of my favourite second hand bookshop, (ELEPHANT BOOKS, LEEDS. GO THERE! BUY STUFF!) and the record shop next door, was covered in an amazing mural by some local graffiti artists. Now some academic from the Uni Art Dept happens to live nearby and was apparently disgusted by the whole thing. Obviously, in her professional opinion, it wasn't art.
The title of this piece suggests that it's going to consider the nature of art, and yet here's the introduction suggesting that any such study is fundamentally futile, confused? At the end of the day the only people really interested in drawing this particular line in the sand are those wanting to be recognised by certain people as artists. The rest of us(1) can think about art not in terms of a rigid definition, but more in terms of the purpose of art and what it says about us. Art is, after all, a constant throughout the history of human behaviour so it is obviously an important part of us.
Having spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject, (and thanks to a minor lifelong fixation with the number three,) I've come to my own way of considering art. As with all ideas or mindsets it's a work in perpetual progress, but it's also currently developed enough to be inflicted upon an unsuspecting readership, so here we go. Art consists of three basic elements: communication, inspiration and stimulation, explore and discuss...
communication
The most fundamental function of art is communication. Now absolutely anything manmade communicates something, even if it's only the existence of its maker, eg. if you see a footprint in the sand you know someone has walked on that beach before you. This unavoidable and unintentional communication.
Intended and considered acts of communication are the next step up, signals and signs that serve a practical purpose. 'Pass the salt please,' or a green traffic light are both examples of us communicating with each other in order to maintain or improve an acceptable physical situation.
Now the evolution of the word bread has carried with it the biblical phrase, 'man cannot live by bread alone,' into the current age very well. Indeed there is more to life than tasty food and smooth flowing traffic. Emotions and abstract ideas spin and multiply within these grossly swollen brains of ours and, while they may seem to serve no real practical purpose, we still feel compelled to communicate them.
A work of art starts inside the artist's head as thought. This concept or feeling is then translated into a physical form making it accessible to others. When the audience views the work, they experience, to some degree, the original notion behind it. Art is, it seems, an attempt to allow us to see inside each other's heads.
As mentioned above, there are about six billion humans knocking about down here, every single one an individual with an entirely unique mind and therefore a unique way of seeing things. The number of ideas out there to be expressed is certainly beyond our capacity to count, so surely art must be a rich a varied source of original and life changing experiences.
It's not though is it? Ask most people about 'the art scene' and they'll recount to you an image of pretentious and cliquey wankers patting each other on the back while the rest of us get on with real life. This is not, however, a reflection on the communicative nature of art, but rather on the way in which our society deals with it.
Generally artists, or artists successful enough to reach wide audiences, come from very similar starting points and share a great deal of experiences, usually through formal training. This means that the ideas they wish to express, and the ways in which they choose to do so, are subsequently similar. Don’t blame art for the artist.
footnotes
(1) Yes, I would like someone to pay me to write, and I would like lots of people to see my work, but I have no desire to be ‘recognized’. I know that I’m an artist and I don’t need anyone else, professional or otherwise, to confirm it.
