What is art? Why do people create art?

Collage of 4 Works of Art

What is art?

What is art? Why should we have a course dedicated to the study of it?

How best to define the term art is a subject of debate; many books and journal articles have been published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term art. The main recent sense of the word art is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art. Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist's creativity, to engage the audience's aesthetic senses, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the finer things.

Often, if the skill is being used in a functional object, people will consider it a craft instead of art—a suggestion that is highly disputed by many contemporary craft thinkers. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way it may be considered design instead of art. Conversely, these may be defended as art forms, called applied art. Some thinkers, for instance, have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with the actual function of the object than any clear definable difference. Art usually implies no function other than to convey or communicate an idea.

Photo of Andy Warhol's Brillo Box

Theories of Art Classification

Many have argued that it is a mistake to even try to define art or beauty—that they have no essence and so can have no definition. Often, it is said that art is a cluster of related concepts rather than a single concept.

Another methodology is the institutional approach to art. This approach states that art must be examined as a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums, and artists get away with is considered art regardless of formal definitions. Most people did not consider a store-bought urinal or a sculptural depiction of a Brillo Box to be art until Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, respectively, placed them in the context of art (in an art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the values that define art.

Why make art?

The procedural approach to art often suggests that it is the process by which a work of art is created or viewed that makes it art, not any inherent feature of an object, or how well received it is by the institutions of the art world after its introduction to society at large. For example, if John Dewey intended a piece to be a poem—it would be a poem whether other poets acknowledge it or not. Whereas if exactly the same set of words was written by a journalist who intended them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, they would not be considered a poem.

There is no single set of values that define what art looks like. Since conceptual art and postmodern theory came into prominence, it has been proven that anything can be termed art. Even preceding these contemporary theories, pre-Modernist and Modernist movements in Western art history did not necessarily share a defined set of aesthetic traits shown in a Baroque painting. It will not necessarily share much with a contemporary performance piece, but they are both considered art.

Despite the seemingly indefinable nature of art, there have always existed certain formal guidelines for its aesthetic judgment and analysis. Formalism is a concept in art theory where an artwork's artistic value is determined solely by its form, or how it is made. Formalism evaluates works on a purely visual level, considering medium and compositional elements as opposed to any reference to realism, context, or content.

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