Art is one of those words in the English language that is hard, if not impossible, to pin down to a single definition. Shakespeare once said all of life is a stage, meaning people are living examples of performance art. The TV show Portlandia has a skit where everything from a mugging to parents having a kid are considered art. The very concept is enough to make your head explode. So why is it that something that looks like it came off the walls of an elementary school is hanging in a museum and selling for millions while many people have paintings in their attic that never live to see the light of day?
The definition of art is different for every person. Most people would agree that the paintings and sculptures found in the Louvre are art. Washington Crossing the Delaware, the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel ceiling are all famous examples of great art but so are the splatter paintings of Jackson Pollock or Blue Monochrome, which is a large monochromatic blue painting.
My personal definition of art is that it conveys a feeling. If something is hard, painful or puzzling to look at then it has created some sort of emotional response even if it is not a positive one or even one that can be labeled or expressed. There is an intense sense of emotion in a single color or a stack of newspapers sitting by themselves in a corner. If someone looks at something and feels or thinks nothing at all then the piece has failed to do anything more than simply take up space. Of course my definition doesn’t have any testable evidence to back it up and relies on the viewers to decide for themselves if something is expressing any sort of feeling and to decide what that feeling is.
Many people try to break down art into the mediums the artist used and focus on the how and why of the piece’s creation. This makes art much easier to classify and label. If a piece fits certain criteria it can be considered art and if not then it can be called entertainment, pornography, a doodle, a craft or something outside of the realm of “art.” But the criteria cannot be measured with numbers or plotted on a graph, meaning that there can still be a gray area when it comes to deciding if a piece meets the criteria or not.
By almost any definition something could be considered art for one person but not for another, which is why the definition is so difficult to define because at some level it is subjective. Art can be all around, or simply confined to a few specific works in a museum. Take the time to study some of the works hanging up in museums or watch people eating lunch and decide for yourself what should be considered art, and then take the time to discover what it means.
