We often attempt to define art by the way it’s made (with creativity or imagination) or who it’s made by (an artist) or what it’s made with (often mediums like painting, drawing, sculpture, etc. but it could really be almost anything) and none of these have ever given us a really satisfying definition. So instead let’s try to define art by the goal the artist has when making it. Those are two characteristics that I think we can all agree that art has to have, it has to be made by someone, and it has to be made on purpose. But obviously there are lots of things that people make on purpose that aren’t art.
There’s one other thing art needs to have, and that’s an intended audience. If an artist is making art on purpose, they have to have an idea about who or how it will be viewed or appreciated. They might not have an accurate idea, or they might believe they’ll be the only ones to ever see it, but they have to have to goal or expectation in mind. And so the question is, how will the audience react to this thing?
Having an emotional reaction to art is a good place to start, that’s often the way we understand art, how does it make us feel? It can surprise or be beautiful or melancholy, etc. But lots of things can cause emotions that aren’t art. A winning lottery ticket, a letter in the mail from a loved one, a story or picture in the news, these can all cause us to have an emotional reaction. And it’s possible that any one of them could be faked, could be make by an artist, with some artistic medium with the goal of causing an emotional reaction in their audience, but it still wouldn’t be art. Why is that? It’s because the goal isn’t right, it’s too broad. Art doesn’t just create an emotional reaction in any way possible, it’s much more limited than that. It creates emotion without the underlying change, or expected change, in a person’s life.
Art: attempting to change a person’s emotions without changing their circumstances.
When we see art we can feel happy or sad or excited, but it’s not because we’re learning something new about the path our lives are taking. It’s not our expectations about the future that are changing, or our view of our place in the world or that we’re reinterpreting our past. Instead art is an attempt to trigger an emotional response without the typical kinds of causes we’d expect in our lives. And I think that’s why making beautiful things is such a fertile subject for artists, in many ways the emotion of beauty is entirely an internal change in ourselves, it’s a difference in our expectations about the way we relate to the world, not about how the world has changed.
Using this definition of art also helps me to see why we group some kinds of art together as “entertainment”, things like TV, books, movies, even video games, etc. These are forms of art that tell a story, and the emotions we tend to feel are mostly caused by empathy. It’s not the empathy we feel for someone in the news paper, a real person who’s had some success or failure. It’s feelings for an imaginary person that don’t reflect any change in the world. Or it could be that the art is in the way the story was told. Something factual or boring can be told in a way that’s beautiful or intrinsic or surprising, and we can have an emotional response to the way the story was told, in addition to any reaction to the subject it was about. Comedy is a great example of this, most of the stories or information conveyed by comedians or in jokes are essentially meaningless or pointless, but we have an emotional reaction to the way in which they’re told.
And of course it’s possible for art to do more than one thing. A poster can be an advertisement, that has the goal of getting people to buy a product, while also having another goal of just being beautiful for itself. Although I suspect that most people would say that if the creation of beauty was solely in the pursuit of some economic goal, that it wouldn’t count as art anymore? And that really helps me to see why the goal of art, the intention of the artist has when imaging the impact the work will have on an imagined audience, is the key defining feature of what makes art, art.