What is Art?
August 9th, 2025
This question has launched a thousand arguments, none of them accomplishing much. We can argue endlessly about the “true nature and meaning of art” and end up no bettter off than when we started. I shall not attempt to answer the question; instead, I shall merely characterize some aspects of art, aware that even this limited approach will evoke plenty of objections.
I begin with the statement that art is (usually) a statement about the human condition. Shakespeare’s plays are art; Michelangelo’s Pieta is art; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is art; Thoreau’s Walden is art; the movie Koyaanisqatsi is art. Each of these works of art makes a powerful statement about the human condition.
Some illumination can be shone on the problem by contrasting art with entertainment. Put starkly, art is an act of self-expression by the artist; entertainment is a commercial product. But few actual works are exclusively one or the other. Shakespeare wrote his plays to make money. Most such works fall on a spectrum between the two extremes:
This represents my personal opinion as to the position of these works of art on the scale. I suppose I should have made this interactive so that you could reposition each of them to what you deem its proper place on the scale, but I’m too lazy to do that.
Indeed, perhaps this should be presented as a two-dimensional graph, placing Hamlet high on both Art and Entertainment, as it contained magnificent artistic content while simultaneously written as a primarily commercial enterprise. Again, I’m too lazy; I’ve got a whole book to write.
Bad Art Versus Non-Art
Consider the messy mix between bad art and non-art. Let’s take Serrano’s 1987 work “Piss Christ”, a photograph showing a plastic crucifix immersed in a small tank of urine. I think that we have to admit that this is a work of art; it most certainly isn’t a work of entertainment! Now, the piece is controversial because people interpret it in different ways. I cannot declare what the “correct interpretation” might be. I can, however, state with confidence that my impression is that it is bad art. I do not see any illuminating statement about the human condition here, but I admit that it is art — just bad art.
Then there are a variety of weird things that attain to art because they’re somehow curious or interesting or just “cool” (I prefer ‘frigorific’ as a classier term for ‘cool’. Look it up.) Here’s an example of a work by an artist known as “Christo”: The Mastaba, made from 1700 oil barrels and floated in the Thames River for a few weeks.
Some years ago, I set up a solar-powered laser on my land:
I aimed it at a point five feet high on the driveway across my land; the target was marked by a white cross on the driveway and was 382 feet from the laser:
The laser beam was only 6 inches in diameter at the white cross; you had to be exactly in its path to see it at full brightness.