What is “art” for you? What are the different ways to think about this term art? Link images or articles that you see relevant to this question or your reflections.
As Marcel Duchamp says, “What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.” Thus, the definition of art today has become so loose that it would probably be easier to talk about what art isn’t.
(Haha.)
To me, art is a man-made experience, aimed at communicating an idea to an audience. It is a means of expression – an expression of imagination, a perspective, an opinion, or of one’s skills. It can serve social, physical and personal functions, and cause differing opinions among people, even over time.
In fact, time plays a major factor in what was/is considered ‘art’; the earliest periods of history point to art being a means of recording and preserving information to be disseminated to later generations. They were made with the function of education in mind, and often had a religious or spiritual connection – to gods, nature spirits, etc. This later changed, with art taking on a more decorative aspect; artists served as craftsmen or artisans, putting aesthetically-pleasing decorations on objects of utility. It was only during the Renaissance era that we began to see the transition of an artist from a pure artisan, to that of one with greater autonomy in communicating his/her views about an issue.
Fast forward to today: art seems everywhere and nowhere at once. Art is in galleries, museums, public spaces and the ether. Art is made for art’s sake, as well as for society and personal catharsis. It no longer needs to be beautiful or even made by the artist’s own hands (see: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Damien Hirst and An Oak Tree, Michael Craig-Martin). With such a broad definition of what art is, then perhaps the more pressing question is what makes ‘good’ art, if there is even such a thing.