Can You Answer?by Liz

What is Art?


The answers are as wide in variety as MySpace profiles. No one can fully answer the question that has plagued artists and intellectuals alike. We can only attempt to answer the unanswerable and make our contribution along with those who have gone before us. The question, "What is art?" has gone through continual metamorphosis throughout each art movement in history.

One art movement in the 50s and 60s was the pop art movement, which involved taking real life media and putting it in the piece of art. The inspiration for pop art came from commercialism and items of mass culture. Such as Andy Warhol's tomato soup cans and brillo boxes. Warhol, along with Robert Rauschenberg, carried along the pop art movement, which transitioned from abstract expressionism in the 1950's. Pop artists were scrutinized by the people in the art world; those who carried the traditional art values and standards could not accept pop art as art.

Everyone has their own idea of what art really is.

According to Britannica online art is, "The use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others."

The 19th century writer Leo Tolstoy wrote a list attempting to answer,
"What is art?"

• If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.
• To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.
• Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

Another 19th century writer who explored the concept of art was Oscar Wilde. In his book The Picture of Dorian Gray an artist becomes obsessed with his subject and the subject becomes physically and spiritually bound to his portrait. In the preface to the book Wilde makes his attempt to define art:

• The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
• Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
• From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol.
• Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
  

Other art movements and styles that went against the flow of traditional realist paintings were:

Abstract Art
Abstract Expressionism
Cubism
Pop Art
Art Nouveau

These art movements and styles made the question, "What is art?" more complicated, because they were different and radical; counter cultural to the art world.

This question lies in all of our hands today.

Let me ask you: "What is art?"