What Is Art?

Aloha! My name is Emma and I am a transfer student, new to Humboldt. I graduated high school in 2009 and started school on the East Coast, but I missed home too much. I took last year off to work and learn about myself. It was the most incredible year of meditation. I was born in Colorado but have been living on Maui for the last few years. I love the ocean. I’ve always been drawn to water and I find the ocean so beautiful and inspiring.

I’ve been a dancer since I was 3—ballet is my passion—but living on Maui encouraged me to experiment with painting and spoken word poetry as well. There’s a lot of awesome energy there. The history of the islands also makes them an incredibly interesting place to study culture. I started school thinking I would study biology, but became interested in anthropology after taking a class on Buddhism. Since moving to Maui I began studying under Llama Gyaltsen at the Maui Dharma Center. So, now I’m back at school and really excited to be here majoring in anthropology!

So, what is art? I think this is kind of like trying to define a color, say, orange. Well, it’s a bright color. But it can be dark too. A lot of things can be orange, like clothing and flowers and foods. It can mean hot or serve as a warning sign. We can associate it with a million different things; we can even eat a fruit of the same name and yet we are no closer to understanding the nature of the color orange. Nevertheless, it is obviously not impossible to have some kind of general conceptual understanding either of the color orange or of art since we recognize them both when we see them.

Art is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I also think there’s simple art and fine art (not necessarily good and bad art) that have very different qualities, and yet must share some common ground to be considered Art. For example, I’m sitting in the apartment that I moved into last week, and I’m staring at the strand of these thin shiny pieces of mica tied together with fishing line that I hung up in front of my window. They came all packaged up in a plastic wrapper for $12. In my opinion they were made to be pretty in the window light, but they weren’t necessarily made to be art. Maybe in a different context…like if I became so inspired to acquire huge pieces of mica and carve them, string them together and hang them from the Empire State Building, maybe it would be art. Behind them propped on the wall is a Monet print, Child In A Garden, in a wooden frame. 

What makes this particular painting Art is that it was created with some expression, emotion, and feeling so that when I see it I feel some expression, emotion, or feeling. We (Monet and myself) have created interpersonal communication; we have created a dialogue. Whether we’re talking about poets, writers, painters, dancers, etc, the goal of the artist as an Artist is to establish this relationship, to convey a message (sometimes) without words such that the audience can respond. Think of the ballerina. (C’mon, how many of you saw Black Swan?) She has to be able to express real emotion and feeling in her steps, to really make you feel something. Otherwise it’s boring. Her dancing becomes only skilled movement without any feeling. It cannot be a dialogue without a visceral reaction from the audience and so it is no longer Art. It is important to remember, like someone said in class the other day, Art can be disgusting. It can make you uncomfortable (check out Carolee Schneemann http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/works.html ). Art can be ugly, and not all pretty things are art.

Perhaps this begs the question, what isn’t art?  One of my favorite authors, Leo Tolstoy, actually writes a whole essay on Art in which he says,

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

Kind of abstract…I know. But, I think really, anything can be art as long as it not only expresses a feeling or emotion but also creates at least the possibility of a dialogue or as Tolstoy says, a union. I don’t even think it has to provoke the same shared feeling between artist and audience, as Tolstoy says, but just some meaningful feeling, even disgust or horror. Cave paintings, African masks and baskets, Native American rugs, sculpture, painting, tattoos, graffiti, food, etc… everything is not inherently art but it has the potential to be.

Often we think of language as the fundamental, defining characteristic of humanity; but I think the most interesting thing about art (in this case music and song) is that is might even have preceded human speech! Obviously this makes art a major form of communication between cultures, times, and individuals themselves, but I think art also defines human existence as we understand it. Ultimately, art is tied into every aspect of human life meaning that to understand people or culture, we have to learn about art within those cultures. I am so excited to be studying the anthropology of art!