What Is Art?

Elitism is one of my peeves. I don't just mean callous CEOs, disdainful hipsters and sneering 15-year-old Internet trolls, either. I mean anyone with a superiority complex exhibiting any kind of presumptuous behavior. Such people probably think their scornful scowls are a means of asserting their dominance and advertising their preeminence; in fact it is broadcasting the fact that they are insufferable dicks. There are as many flavors of pretention as there are arenas of human activity, but since this is a blog about writing, I'm going to focus on the bookish variety.

It seems quite fashionable to dismiss mainstream, commercial, mass-market fiction as somehow less valid, less relevant, less important etc. than literary fiction. This bugs me, and I'll tell you why. The fact that something is popular and successful does not necessarily mean it's bad. The fact that something is obscure, opaque and inaccessible does not automatically make it great. Is it possible for an erotic dystopian vampire Western to be good? Of course it is. Is it possible for an 800-page, experimental, cross-cultural, multi-generational, semi-fictional memoir that uses an unreliable narrator and boldly combines a minimalist style with an existential brand of magical realism be awful? Oh, yes.

I have a friend who makes a very good living writing period romance novels. I feel chafed on her behalf whenever I hear someone disparage that genre. Criticize or praise a specific book, if you wish, but don't categorically write off an entire segment of the publishing industry. Remember how you figured out in elementary school that the secret to taking true/false tests was that statements that included absolute words such as "always" and "never" often tended to be false?

Shakespeare's plays were written to sell tickets, not to permeate the English cultural tradition and achieve immortality. All those juvenile puns, crass innuendos and gratuitously bloody fights were blatant theater-bait. But he (or she or they, whatever) did it well, and that's what counts.

Some things are so firmly embedded in the collective consciousness that their status is safe. Michelangelo? Art. Handel? Art. Baryshnikov? Art. Olivier? Art. Kurosawa? Art. Lennon? Art. Where it gets tricky is drawing the line at the bottom. Comparing Finnegan's Wake to 50 Shades of Grey is ludicrous. They're not striving for the same goal. It's like asking, which is better, a loaf of bread or a vacuum cleaner?

On the other end of the spectrum, some might broadly claim that everything is art — every rock, every tree, every sunset, every fire hydrant, every roll of paper towels. Well, that is certainly a poetic point of view, but I feel like it renders the term somewhat meaningless. Is it really a compliment to call something "art" when every scrap of windblown garbage also qualifies?

Art is an intrinsically elusive idea that resists all but the most flexible parameters. Even when you hammer out a relatively agreeable consensus, an exception inevitably comes along, giggling.

Even so, many self-anointed critics are quick to snort that this or that is "not art," a proclamation that is notoriously difficult to dispute. So what is art? Ambitious question. There is an entire field of science and philosophy, aesthetics, devoted to this tangled, squishy subject. And since everyone from Plato to Nietzsche to the clerk at the Circle K has already weighed in, I may as well toss in my own 1.04 cents (adjusted for inflation).

My personal five-part definition of art casts what I consider to be a very wide net:

(1) It must be a form of human expression.
(2) It must have been created on purpose.
(3) It must have required some kind of technical skill.
(4) It must provoke an emotional response.

And this brings me to the fifth and most bitterly controversial element of my test:

(5) It must be possible to differentiate it from random objects or normal daily activity. (I know that sometimes people spill a bottle of turpentine on a newspaper in their garage and call it art, but I call shenanigans on that. It's disrespectful to real artists.)

That fifth rule doesn't mean that a sculpture made from bits and pieces of trash can't be art. It certainly can. Just recently, Trish and I visited a gallery on Central Avenue in which an artist had created astonishingly beautiful and intricate figures made entirely from discarded household items. But if no one — not even other artists — can tell the difference between the alleged sculpture and an actual pile of ordinary trash, then perhaps that attempt falls below the threshold.

I want to emphasize that these are only general guidelines, and that almost anything can be done with artistic intent. I also want to tack on the caveat that it doesn't matter at all whether I actually happen to like a particular thing. Cubism, for example, doesn't generally speak to me, but that doesn't mean I say cubism isn't art.

The real point is this: by that definition, yes, I do call every novel on the New York Times Bestseller List art, even the ones I don't personally care for. Even the ones that, by most reasonable and objective academic standards of writing, aren't especially good.

Just because an artist has never sold a single piece of her own work in her life does not mean she is any less of an artist than someone who has made millions selling her work. And the opposite is equally true. Financial success is neither directly proportional nor inversely proportional to artistic credentials; it is immaterial.


( xkcd )

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