it never really occurred to me to think about a down-to-the-point definition of art, but found it interesting to do.
photography is pretty central to my understanding of art
so I may be rather biased towards it in my explanations. also it's a big fucking topic and no matter how much I write it'll feel like missing a lot. if you don't want to read all of this, the last two or three paragraphs are the more important ones in this post.
there seem different ways to approach art, depending on which aspect one emphasizes. one could say that art is manipulating something material so as to make it recognizable as art and thus to stimulate a perception process (ideally), which may work on many different levels: intellectual, emotional, aesthetic/visual, audible and sometimes but not very often spiritual (I may be leaving out a lot here). so you take a pencil and colors, apply them to a canvas in a special way, and voilá, you got yourself a work of art. or you take wood and carve out certain areas while leaving others. or you take light sensitive film and put it in a box and whatever it needs to produce a picture. but then again, there are artforms that can be art and yet don't need to manipulate material, such as dance or singing.
also, you can manipulate tons of material, and it won't be recognized as art, because, simply, it wasn't intended as such. you can take thousands of photos, but they won't be recognized as art, because they are photos of the table you want to sell on ebay.so quite central to art seems to be intent, which gives thousands of possibilities. for example, you can do art because you want to bring an awareness of something into the consciousness of other people which wasn't there before. this was my understanding of art for a long time. I went to an exhibition once, by Boris Becker (not the tennis guy), and what it basically showed was houses. just houses. straight and precise pictures. at first it bored the hell out of me, I came from a background of surfing deviantart, which seems to specialize in absurdly colorful and dramatic pictures, also, cats. it was quite a let-down at first to go to the gallery and just look at prints of houses, but what it did when I went back outside was that I opened my gaze to take in these things, and it was very very interesting, because I stopped just running by these houses, but actually look at them.
very closely related to this is art that seeks to bring awareness about matters more serious than architecture, namely global warming, poverty, war, environmental issues etc.. Edward Burtynksy appears as a hero in this regard. a video of him at ted:
http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_burtyns ... f_oil.html that's a short one, there's a 30 minute video as well.
you can do art to convey intellectual ideas. it is a kind that I dread a bit, because these works are often hard to read if you haven't spent much time in your life getting into this kind of thing. it's a bit elitist, no question. furthermore, it's a bit boring. it's intellectualizing for the sake of intellectualizing, which can be fun, but soon looses itself in pointlessness and in my opinion often in pretentiousness. much of the viennese photography scene seems pretty hooked on this. not all of course, but a part of it.
you can do art out of a simple joy to create something, out of a simple joy about patterns, geometry, colors, textures etc.this seems very central to art in general, I don't know much to say about it though. it seems that man has an innate desire to somehow replicate and imitate his surroundings. if we are to be hyperbole, the universe is a complete work of art. look at a tree! what marvelous forms these things take, these grand sculptures. the lines of washed out stone, the patterns on burnt wood, the absolutely chaotic scattering of stars in the sky - irreproducible by humans, any attempt to do so would have a pattern of intent in it. (I'm speculating here, maybe there are some zen artists who mastered this one way or another)
no doubt, humans have been inspired by these things a lot, and tried to imitate them, or take their own spin on it. sometimes this feels a bit like a hoax. why would I go into a sterile museum to look at a picture of a tree or person that someone painted, when I just could go outside and stare at the most splendid trees and beautiful intelligent faces outside?
it may be a question of time and conserving something. the outside world is in constant flux, people get annoyed if you look at them for a long time (I don't like that. india is pretty cool in that respect, everybody can stare at everybody and it doesn't matter). so because of the world being in constant flux, you could say that art is a way of trying to get hold of it, to make it stop relentlessly changing. I was always a bit skeptical about that, making a photo of something seemed more like acknowledging change, rather than fighting against it.
the list of intents could go on endlessly, I feel like I covered only a very very tiny fraction, some art seems to express thing that I have no idea how I am going to put it in words.
Rothko for example
every definition of art is bound to be revised and overthrown. if I were to define art as this and that, someone would come along and do something outside of this definition and it would still classify as art if I am honest.
this brought me to the conclusion that art becomes art when you say it is. kinda lame I know, but this is the broadest definition I could come up with. if I were to say that art is manipulating material to make it stimulating in the above mentioned ways, someone would come along and do a performance, or something else that wouldn't fit into the current theory of art, and we will have to start anew.
I have no evolutionary explanation for art, and I doubt it would make great sense to approach it that way - I'm not entirely sure about that though. what I feel is that the biologistic viewpoint often leaves out so god damn much that it hurts in its naiveté, it views life in a way that makes it (seemingly) loose its grace and wonder.
"do not measure the tree, sit in its shade, look at it"
when we talk about evolutionary purposes, we ask how something helps our survival, but that is very reductionistic. I believe, no I'm 100% certain, that humans have a metaphysical faculty, a plane of existence of sorts that natural sciences like to be blind to. this plane is not concerned with survival, for it is never born and never dies, and thus doesn't need to seek to survive/achieve goals. it just is. it is out of which everything stems and grows, where all the energy for life, let alone the possibility for it, comes from. it may be that art is an expression of this creative principle, rather than an expression of animal faculties. I don't rule out the latter though, considering that symbol making and reading had a very important role in our survival, and art pretty much classifies as symbol making.
I'll leave it at that, if you read all of this, thank you
