ART

What Exactly Is Art, Anyway?

Our myths tell us that in the beginning, humans were those creatures who named things. We gave names to plants and animals, and to natural occurrences like ocean waves and stars, and to states of mind and tools we make.

When we named things, we gave them a status in our minds that encouraged language. Instead of holding the meaning of something solely in our mind, we also added its name to our vocabulary. Then, instead of having to take a friend or family member to the elderberry patch where there was food to gather, we could sit around the fire at night and tell our friend that, “Down by the black rock where we go swimming, there’s a big patch of ripe elderberries waiting to be eaten.” Think of the amount of information in that simple sentence. Just a few words but a big impact on tomorrow’s breakfast. Without moving from our campfire, we invested the name of elderberry with directions to a place, to the time when the fruits are ripe, and to the bittersweet flavor of a rich food. “Elderberry” acquired meaning.

Meaning begets importance, and importance begets value. What’s important to us is valuable, and that shapes our choices. Our choices define us as individuals and, collectively, as a culture.

We humans are makers of things—from utilitarian objects like toasters to practical things like vegetable gardens to beautiful things like jewelry and to pleasures like cooking, sports, and the arts. When we make things, we invest them with meaning. First, we conceive of what we want from the tool we intend to make. Then we devise ways for that tool to satisfy the want and enhance the tool’s utility. We can dig with a stick, but once we know metallurgy, we realize a blade is more durable. And then we might envision a long handle that turns the digger into a lever that multiplies the force we apply to the task. And we end up with a spade.

We attach personal meanings to things we name throughout our lives, mentally painting them with importance. Those marguerites are dear to me because my mom loved them when she was alive. My 1950 Pontiac meant freedom to me when I was 16. Our culture also attaches meaning to things. Plymouth Rock is just a large rock, but it has deep historical significance.

Personal meanings are ours while we live and usually die with us unless they have enough universal importance that they cross the line into the culture. And for that to happen, our personal meanings and their importance need a vehicle to make the crossing, and that’s the role of art. Shakespeare’s vehicle was his plays. The meaning of what he wrote is so important and well done that our culture still cherishes his work after 400 years.

Cultural importance can persist through many years--always reflecting the consensus within what we call the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. We see the same process in nature, where individuals--trees, bacteria, elephants, etc.—come and go, but the great wheel of life we call the ecosystem continues to roll, changing but never dying.

Both individually and culturally, people prioritize things we make. Some things we can’t do without. Cooking and food production, for instance. Clothing and shelter for two more. Some things achieve deep meaning and thus importance beyond their practical applications. Paintings, for instance. Most people might find importance in DaVinci’s Mona Lisa or Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, while a smaller group might find Mark Rothko’s ethereal rectangles of color every bit as important.

And why are they important? Because they, like all worthwhile human creations, have an emotional impact. When a sports hero like Mickey Mantle steps to the plate and hits a towering home run to win a baseball game for the Yankees in the last inning, you’ll see, hear, and feel the tidal wave of emotion from the crowd. When many people hear Brahms’ Third Movement of his Third Symphony,

it brings them to tears. The precision and perfection of Suzanne Farrell’s ballet dancing left audiences in awe. Eugene O’Neill’s play, “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” is a glimpse into a family’s pathos that leaves audiences emotionally exhausted—and is a masterpiece because of it.

No matter whether the product is considered art or science, no matter whether its subject is beautiful or ugly, practical or mundane or anything in between, its impact on the human psyche is central to its name. Without a name, nothing acquires meaning that leads toward art, because its name makes it separate from all other things. Its importance is based on its meaning, its value is based on its importance, and important art is most highly valued.

That “impact on the human psyche” is art’s punch, but it isn’t the power behind the psychological fist that delivers the blow. That power—the psychological energy that touches the human heart—comes from the artist who created the object, or danced the dance, or hit the homer.

And an artist’s power is consummate skill. It doesn’t make any difference what the subject matter is. It can be as ugly as Titus Andronicus, as creepy-scrawly as a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, as intensely crafted as a Faberge Egg, or as drop-dead beautiful as Michaelangelo’s David, but if the craftsmanship is done with consummate skill, it’s Art with a capital A.

Can something that’s sloppy and repulsive, like Andres Serrrano’s “Piss Christ”—a photo of a crucifix floating in a jar of urine—be Art? Well, yes, if audacity touches the human heart powerfully enough, which Serrano’s piece does, even if that touch is a slap in the face. Picasso’s Guernica isn’t pretty—it evokes the horror of war as it shows the annihilation of living beings—but it picks off the scabs that protect the emotional hearts of human beings.

Can an amateur painting of pretty flowers and bunny rabbits be Art? If no consummate artist produced the work, such a painting is cloying, predictable, and cliché. But in the hands of an artist like Jeff Koons, who, with consummate skill, makes Art of cloying, predictable everyday objects; Claes Oldenburg, who used consummate skill in making huge replicas of everyday objects, and Andy Warhol, whose cranked out versions of modern icons like Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup Cans showed a consummate artist shoving our faces so deep into banality that we begin to see there’s value in understanding the platonic imagery behind them and how it’s used by marketeers to fashion our taste and spend our money, banality and cliché can be the clay used to give profound meaning to those things through the consummate skill of the artist.

Art is the place where two monumental forces touch. One is the artistic force by which the individual artist first conceives of a work, then produces it with consummate skill. The second is the force within the individual who engages with the artwork and is deeply emotionally and intellectually touched by it—often so much so that it stays with him or her throughout their life as a shaper of perception.

When I was a very small child, my mom read a poem to me called “The Circus Parade.” It included a line, “…with lions and tigers that pace up and down…” accompanied by artwork showing a circus wagon with bars that caged the animals. Their faces were always turned to the crowd, whether they paced right or left. They never stopped pacing. As I grew, I came to understand their caged-ness, and that the pacing was to relieve their stress at being confined. They were not happy to be performing for my amusement. And eventually I came to understand that they had been kidnapped from their homes on grassy plains and deep jungle and transported to our world, so that little children like me could laugh and clap at their pitiable display. To this day, that poem and the accompanying pictures have stayed with me, changing from a source of delight into a soulful wish to set those creatures free. And eventually, to set myself free and end the pacing up and down that was my former state of being and achieve ascension.

Art, then, is like a beacon of light that illuminates the interior landscapes within us so we can see where we are, see what’s available, and chart a course home.

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