| I think that art can be defined (somewhat vaguely) as well as evaluated. For example, it is easy to distinguish an artistic painting--which is literally a canvas coated with paint--from, say, a painted barn, which is also an object coated with paint, but which lacks the defining characteristics of an artistic painting. That means there must be something special about art.
So what are those defining characteristics? I'm not an expert and I've never written much about art, but I'll give it a shot:
1) It is intended to be art.
2) It is identifiable as art because it follows a tradition, a style, or a mode of expression that is associated with art.
3) Our perception allows us to identify it as art.
4) Turning toward more concrete characteristics, a work of art normally has a composition, whether it is regular or irregular and whether it is conventional or unconventional. In other words, there is a conscious element of design or technique.
5) While art can certainly serve more than one purpose, on a fundamental level it is an end in itself.
6) A work of art that is intended to represent something nonetheless exists in its own right with its own characteristics, e.g., a special arrangement of paint on a canvas. In other words, not only is it a representation of something, it is also a work of art in itself.
Those are simply thoughts off the top of my head at 4:00am in the morning.
The trouble with trying to define "art" is that there are so many styles and so many different forms. Art is sort of like a language that evolves as it is created, perceived, thought about, talked about, repeated, modified, and changed by people who want to "break the mold".
As an analogy, think about what a "play" is. There is no Platonic form for a play. Plays did not always exist, and the way that plays are written and performed has changed over the years. The first plays were primitive by modern standards, and styles and tastes have certainly varied from one culture and/or one time period to the next.
Your own experiences with plays also change the way you think about plays. The first time you see a play, you don't know what to expect, and you might not understand what a play is supposed to be. But after you read or watch hundreds or thousands of plays, you become (dare I say it?) more sophisticated. Your tastes change, you begin to recognize patterns, and you have a large well of experience to draw upon as you evaluate each new play you see or read. Art is much the same.
If art cannot be evaluated, and if all professional critics deserve to be ignored, then we might as well say the same thing about anyone who reviews books, computer games, architecture, figure skating, dancing, music, movies, and anything else you can think of.
Back to the nature of art: Not only is our perception of the world reflected in art, but art itself also influences the way we perceive the world. Over time, art will change, and so will the way we perceive art. The way we perceive the world itself can also change. And when our perception changes, we look for new things or new meanings in new (and old) works of art. We evolve just as art evolves.
If you don't believe me, then take a life drawing class sometime. When we see an object, normally our brain registers the image and we have an idea in our minds about what the object is. From there, we cease to think about the image itself because we're thinking about our idea of the thing we're looking at. But if you want to draw a picture of it, then you have to interrupt that process and concentrate on the image itself and its physical characteristics, such as shade and shadow, color, size, perspective, etc. And then you have to make decisions about how you want to represent it. You might choose to emphasize a certain feature or characteristic, or might choose to change the way it looks by the way you decide to frame it and compose the various elements on your canvas (or sketchbook or whatever). In any case, you're looking at it in a different way than you ever did before.
Human faces were particularly problematic for me, due to the way that our brains index facial features starting at a very early age. We have trouble remembering what the faces of people from unfamiliar ethnic groups look like because we don't have a "catalog" in our minds by which we can recognize them. If you weren't surrounded by Asian people when you were growing up and you try to analyze the bone structure of an Asian face, it just doesn't make sense at first. In the first place, the recognition processes that are at work in your brain weren't meant to analyze those features; they were meant to call up thoughts and memories and so forth when you see a person. Second of all, the shapes and proportions are unfamiliar, and you have to fight the impulse to draw them the same way you would draw faces you are familiar with (which is what your mind tries to make you do at first).
There are other, more significant ways that our perception of the world can change. For example, what do you think when you see a woman. There are all possible sorts of sexual or sexist overtones. The way that art can change our perceptions is by confronting that or by framing the subject in a new perspective tnat changes the way we see it. Art has a lot of give and take.
I have offered opinions about art in previous messages, and I don't feel like trying to explain them again at the moment. (I'm too exhausted.) But I think I made them fairly clear before.  |