What is Art? A Framework

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what is art? a framework

WARNING: Excessive use of the word “curate” below.

Last week, I wrote what I now consider to be a sort-of “proto-essay” arguing that AI art is art. I do feel that this argument could’ve been made without taking on the task of attempting to define what art is overall; instead, the argument could’ve relied solely on comparisons to widely accepted forms of art. However, I found it to be a more interesting challenge to attempt to build something of a framework for defining art – and, indeed, it was a challenge!

Rather than trying to answer multiple questions in a single Codex entry, I thought it would be best to provide a complete and functional framework absent a greater argument. This is my attempt to understand and communicate the definition of art that I intuitively use. It does end up including nearly anything you may have ever heard described as art, such as controversial modern art, or art that can be judged as extremely low effort.

The purpose of this framework is to provide a binary yes or no to whether or not something can be considered “art.” It makes no attempt to provide a means of objective measurement of the merit of that art, however.

I am interested in the legal and ethical questions surrounding art, especially as a vaporwave enjoyer, but an exploration of those questions is beyond the scope of this Codex entry. It is possible that I may explore these questions at a later date.

Without further adieu!

the framework

the details

As is immediately apparent, this is a curation-based framework. Generally speaking, human selection is an intentional act of creativity and nearly all that is required for something to be considered art. Since this isn’t an intuitively satisfying answer, this necessitates additional conditions that aim to both shape and clarify what constitutes as art.

A primary goal behind this framework was to be as universal and self-evident as possible. Certain extremes that will cause disagreement are apt to exist in every framework. This is inevitable when seeking to bring a certain level of objectivity into a space dominated by subjective interpretation.

Curation

The common element among all art is curation, and I believe it is the most effective framework to use when defining what constitutes as art. Choice is inevitably colored by preference, which is influenced or entirely determined by intention. Choosing to create art for virtually any reason is nearly all it takes to create art, no matter how well that art is subsequently received or accepted.

Skill & Chance

Skill

“Skill” encompasses both technical ability and something like the proficiency to effectively translate an interesting or novel artistic intention into artistic form. As an example, it’s arguable that art which effectively communicates a sufficiently interesting or novel message with minimal technical abilities may require more skill. Think about the feelings evoked by your favorite piece of art being replicated in their entirety by something like a haiku; a haiku is technically much simpler than a film or most renowned paintings, but these limitations arguably open the door for more and deeper skill expression.

Chance

“Chance” is the other side of the coin to skill; it isn’t quite an opposite, and an artist can harness it in intentional ways, but it is comparatively much less precise or predictable. Photography is frequently a good example of this, where a photographer can have an intention with the type of photographs they’re aiming to capture, but end up witnessing and photographing a rare or unrelated occurrence they hadn’t initially set out to.

“Luck is preparation meeting opportunity,” however, and an inexperienced photographer could entirely fail to recognize the opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime photo, or could even recognize it but subsequently take a shot that does not do the subject justice. Conversely, an experienced photographer could be compared to an experienced poker player in this way; the experienced photographer has a better understanding of how to exert control over chance elements, and ends up with more higher quality photographs as a result.

Context

“Context” is essentially the lens through which the art is viewed. A fictional story can be told in the form of a play, musical, film, song, album, poem, etc. Something like an ancient artifact that isn’t self-evidently artistic can be elevated to an artistic status by understanding or providing the greater context of its role in history – its story, in other words, such as would be seen in a museum. A mathematical fractal equation may not appear to have artistic qualities, though it arguably could under some circumstances, and absolutely would if it was recontextualized into a visual form. Some more esoteric examples are the number of songs that contain hidden images that have been encoded into audio, or the many Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) that have run their course over the years.

Different forms of art can require vastly different ratios of skill and chance, and different types of skills entirely. The ratio of skill to chance exercised in the creation of a traditional, life-like oil painting may be comparable to something like creating a marble sculpture, but there appears to be little overlap in the types of skill required for each; these differences in types of skill become very apparent with art like a ready-made sculpture, where an artist can almost entirely abstract out technical skill and focus squarely on recontextualization. Both the message intended with the recontextualization and the act of recontextualization itself offer plenty of opportunity for skill expression, even in cases where technical skill appears to be nearly absent.

The 3 Conditions

These 3 conditions must be met before something can be considered as wholly art:

  1. It must be in a form that can be communicated or shared, even if it never is.

    • This first half is almost entirely self-evident. For example, an unexpressed thought in someone’s mind would not be considered to be art today, because it isn’t in a form that can be communicated. However, it isn’t too difficult to imagine a future where humans could communicate and express these thoughts with each other mind-to-mind. At that time, the concept of a thought in someone’s mind could be considered to be art, assuming that technology has reached that point and the abstract idea of “a thought” is scientifically sound. If this hypothetical future came to be, the idea of transmitting art directly mind-to-mind may be analogous to something like verbal storytelling.

    • The first half also aims to make it clear that art must be captured in some human way. Perhaps the ants in our front yard have beautifully intricate dances and rituals, but it isn’t until it is curated to be expressed in a communicable way to humans that it could be elevated to “art.”

    • The second half may seem like slightly less of a given, but all I’m trying to say is that art doesn’t require an audience. In the shallow end of the pool, this means something like, if an artist creates a work of art and doesn’t show anyone, it is still art. Perhaps at the deepest end, this same rule applies even if the artist never sees the art; a blind artist creating and then discarding a painting still created art, even if it was never viewed.

  2. It must result from deliberate acts that exercise control over its medium or setting.

    • Art created nearly entirely by chance, such as something like having a camera unintentionally slip out of your hands and it snapping a photo on the way down, would not be art. But, the moment that a human discovers and curates the photo, intentionally exerting some level of control over its medium or setting, it would then become art.

  3. It must aim to or incidentally express a human idea, or natural phenomenon through human framing.

    • “Human idea” is a very malleable term, but its purpose is to reiterate that the human experience must be involved in some way, whether emotional, intellectual, or cultural. Mere beauty or the appreciation of aesthetic qualities would constitute a human idea, as would the rejection of these, for example.

    • “A natural phenomenon through human framing” is actually redundant to “human idea” and is only here to clarify that nature/discovery/chance all fall under the umbrella of a “human idea” once curated.

    • “aim to”: the purpose for this allowance is to include art that fails in its intentions.

    • “incidentally”: meant to include art that was not created with the intention of being art, but ultimately becomes art after curation – this could be through the mere act of recognition, or a complete recontextualization.

Conclusion

Perhaps at a later date, I will either update this Codex entry or simply reference back to it with a number of examples or counter-arguments – or even attempt to objectively measure artistic merit! Crazy, I know.

For now however, I will leave it be. This is currently my best effort at documenting “my” definition of “art.” Again, I believe this definition to be almost entirely self-evident; and I believe that quibbles over this question generally stem from a subjective feeling of a piece of art lacking sufficient effort or over-relying on chance.

While writing the framework, I tried to maintain a clean slate as much as possible and avoided consuming content that attempted to do what I was trying to do. That said, I am interested in applying my framework, and therefore I’m interested in stretching it to its limits and potentially even getting involved in these sorts of discussions.

I’d like to express my gratitude to anyone taking the time to read something so niche; thank you!

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