thepoliblog

What is Art?

Alfred Sisley, The innondation at Port Marly, painted 1876. Presently in le Musée des beaux-arts de Rouen.

Art is anything that is contrived to elicit strong sensations in ourselves or in others.

What makes a deliberately created something into art, is that it is evocative.

That means that it resonates with something in the viewer’s or hearer’s brain, like a wine glass resonating to the sound of a violin, or a window of a house resonantly vibrating – buzzing – to the sound of a motor.

Anything that tries to play, like a musical instrument, the nervous systems of those who are exposed to it, is art.

That includes painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, acting, literature, and rhetoric (in its classical, general, not-necessarily-pejorative meaning): speeches, persuasive writing, informative writing, advertising, and even demogoguery.

But each brain is different – different experiences, different wiring- so what is evoked is different.

To some extent the impact of a work of art is measured not by what is evoked in each person, but by how many respond, and how strongly.

Here is a list of artistic activities.  Many of them are not usually thought of as being artistic.  Some give pleasure, others are deliberately unpleasant.  Some are evil.  But in each case you should easily be able to identify the presence of the defining characteristic of art, namely, the deliberate attempt to play the brains of the audience as if those brains were musical instruments.  In some cases  the intended audience is just the artist.  The redundancies in the list are there to better make a point.
– Humor, including stand-up comedy and informal jokes
– Circus acts
– Performing astounding feats for films or for on-line videos (attempts to impress or amuse, or to do both at the same time)
– Thoughtful photography
– Music, drawing and painting, sculpture, dance
(includes feats of art that are designed to impress as well as to please or inform: items featured on the Twisted Sifter, Cirque de Soleil)
– Fiction and expository non-fiction (written, or acted, or cartooned)
– Comic books, graphic novels, cartoon films
– Textbooks, instructional materials, user’s manuals,
– Web interfaces, other digital interfaces (such as those to an operating system or a programming language)
– All rhetoric in the classical non-pejorative sense: speech or other media that are designed to persuade
– Religious tales (Abraham and Isaac, David and Goliath, the birth, life and crucifixion of Jesus, Mohammed on a flying horse)
– Political claims, both true and false
– Demagoguery
– Advertising
– The deliberate giving of sexual or other sensual pleasure (to one’s self or to another), e.g., sensual massage, masturbation, erotica, sexual fantasies
– Its opposite: the deliberate imposition of pain, e.g., torture
– Fantasies, daydreams (but not involuntary dreams)
– Dressing for effect, couture, make-up
– Planning and hosting a party or other event
– Interior design and decoration, architecture, landscape design
– The design, crafting and wearing of costumes, dressing up (including for Halloween), jewelry
– Sports, including gladiatorial sports (boxing, wrestling, mixed martial arts)
– Ceremonies, rituals
– Public punishment (including executions)
– All entertainment
– The shock-and-awe component of terrorist acts (another type of attempt to impress)
– Intimidation, bullying

Clearly, we are an artistic species.

Clearly, not all art is benign.

All art is manipulative, even when the person being manipulated is the artist/daydreamer/fantasist.

Not all art has humans as its intended audience.  Art for pets and other non-human animals: pleasant environments for pets (wheels and tunnels and hiding places in a cage for hamsters), the design and operation of of zoos, …

In the future, not all art will have biologically evolved beings as its sole intended audience.  There will even be art and entertainment for autonomous robots.

Any deliberate attempt to strum the strings of a brain as if they were the strings of a musical instrument is art.  The brain may be the artist’s own, or someone else’s, or both.  The brain may be biological or artificial (designed).

But not all such attempts attain their goal.

If an attempt does attain its goal, it is good as art, whether or not it is also good ethically and morally.

All art requires the artist to mentally mirror the minds in the intended audience.
For such an attempt to resonate with the brains of a wide audience, the ‘musician’ and the audience must share a culture, or mental mechanisms (e.g., adult humans affecting human babies or animals, or animals affecting animals), or the musician must at least be familiar with how the members of the target population respond.

Some non-contrived stimuli elicit the same sensations as art: sunsets, scenery, a flower, a baby, a puppy or a kitten.  They elicit the same stimuli as art,  because they share parts of the same processing paths in the brain.

Because we live at a stage of evolution when we are familiar with the concepts of an artist and of art, those sensations may also make us feel to that the  evocative stimuli were created by an artist.

To a being who had not been exposed to the concept of an artist, the same stimuli might be just as evocative, without suggesting that they were due to an artist.

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