What is Art? (L.E.)

​What is art? The question that has haunted every art class I have attended. It lurks under the surface of almost every question or statement made about visual art, and it is potentially the fastest route to art block known to mankind. What is art? Am I making it? Are they making it? What makes something art and not, for example, a photocopy? What about shadows cast on a wall? The shadows themselves may not be art, but what about a photo of those shadows, even one taken in passing, or by accident? Is an artist simply the person who thought first to take that photo? Do those shadows not become art until they have been reproduced by the human hand, in paint for example? What about artists? When can you claim yourself to be “an artist”? When you spend enough time making art? When you care enough? When you decide to? When you make money off your products? Art is an infamously non-lucrative endeavor, I doubt that could be the case. 

This could seem to be a question of semantics: art is art, you know it on the face of it. However, I can’t help but remember the hotbed question of our own curriculum: “What constitutes a ‘Great Book’?” Similarly to that question, the question of art is important because on some fundamental level, the way that we answer will shape our view of the world, and ourselves. The St. John’s website answers that a Great Book in some way shapes the ideas of Western civilization, and so if I may venture the beginning of an answer to the other question, art is the creation of those ideas. (Broadly speaking, not just for the Western civilization). Flannery O’Connor answered this question in her essay, The Nature and Aim of Fiction when she said, 

“St. Thomas called art ‘reason making.’ This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself.”

Art is what happens when we take in the world around us, and answer back with something beyond ourselves.

Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshNovember 27, 2022 at 7:19 PM

    An eloquent conclusion -- that I'd love to hear more about! Did St. Thomas mean by "art" the same thing we do? -- i.e., as in "the liberal arts," which are indeed "reason-making." Why would we say art is one thing, other than for a logical need?

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