‘What is art’ you ask? this column, of course
Anything anybody says is art as well as an ugly shoe indeed
But is it Art?
I wanted to do something fun and lightweight for today’s column,
so the topic is: What is art, anyway?
This question has occupied the world’s great (and sometimes not
so great) minds for at least two thousand years, so I thought a
little column in the Daily Bruin would be the perfect place to
settle the issue once and for all.
Well, here’s the answer: Art does not mysteriously reside in the
objects we call works of art, it rather is a specific way of
looking at things.
(Oh, and it’s also the first name of Paul Simon’s former singing
buddy, but that’s another story.)
Okay, now that that’s settled, let’s talk about something
else.
Oops, hold it, you’re not convinced yet? Sorry, I guess I’ll
have to elaborate.
First of all, let’s get something straight. Most of the time,
the complaint that "this ain’t art!" just means that the person
voicing it does not like the work under consideration. It really
says "this is terribly bad art," but it does not actually touch
upon the status as art in itself.
I’m not concerned here with any distinctions between good and
bad, "high" and "low" art, or the constant battle about the
boundaries between art and popular culture.
I want to come up with an explanation of the phenomenon that
accounts for all the things that have been called art. There must
be something about a Mozart opera, a novel by Melville, Warhol’s
soup cans, a Led Zeppelin song, a Carl Barks comic, a picture of
dogs playing poker and the films of Czech master director Frantisek
Schlupp that allows all of them to possibly be considered art.
Traditionally, some "essence of art," located in these objects
themselves, would be sought as the key to the puzzle. Some common
quality would be proposed to be responsible for making them works
of art.
For example, one thing that is often mentioned as a deciding
factor is the remoteness from everyday life, the basic absence of a
real function. Art is art because it is not directly concerned with
the supposed three "bare necessities" of survival: feeding,
fighting and f…- uh, having sex.
But if you think about it, art is very much a part of real life.
You are not magically transported to another world by experiencing
art, the wheels don’t suddenly stop turning just because you listen
to music or read a book.
Producing art is a very real way of providing for food, staking
out territory, or increasing your chances of getting laid. (Of
course, art can also be the tangible result of somebody not getting
laid, like the symphonies of Beethoven and Bruckner.)
And if you look at the kind of money bestsellers and hit movies
make, it is hard to hold up the pretense that they have no
functioning part in "real" economy. I mean, not only do the budgets
for big blockbusters regularly exceed the GNP of most smaller
nations – some of them even approach amounts that come close to
what Bill "Nerd for Windows" Gates makes in a week.
Furthermore, it seems strange to proclaim an objective quality
that will make something identifiable as art, when our definition
of art encompasses things like liturgical music, early movies and
industrial design that were never intended to be, neither seen for
most of their existence as, art.
This is why I would argue that art is not to be found within all
of these objects themselves, but solely in the way you look at
them. Art is wholly a question of the context in which something is
presented. To take it to the extreme: art is, whatever somebody
chooses to call thus.
(Well, chooses to call "art", actually. Calling it "thus"
normally just confuses people.)
Here, we have one of the few instances where saying it does make
it so. Because, the moment something is presented as art, a certain
mode of perception will be engaged. A specific set of expectations
and possible responses will be triggered, and suddenly we’re in the
middle of a cultural experience.
Since all of this might sound a little dry and academic (and we
certainly wouldn’t want to have anything like that, here at a
university, would we?), I’d better give you an example.
I could take, say, one of my shoes and instantly turn it into a
piece of art. All I’d have to do would be presenting it in a way
that clearly says: "This is supposed to be art!" Exhibiting it in a
gallery and sticking a $10,000 price-tag on it would, for example,
do the trick.
Now you will no doubt emphatically argue that your response to
such an exhibition, as a thoughtful and cultivated human being,
would be to exclaim: "What is this stupid piece of crap? That’s
just an ordinary shoe! This isn’t art!"
But see, you’ve already proven your statement wrong. Because, if
this is just an ordinary shoe, why are you screaming about it?
You’d never do that if you saw the very same shoe in an everyday
context, say in a shoe store or being worn by me.
The simple fact that circumstances were signaling "Beware, Art!"
led you to look at the object in a way that is specific to our idea
of art. Sure, it’s not what anybody would seriously consider great
art, but that doesn’t matter.
The important thing is that the object, without acquiring
anything additional in itself, suddenly became completely
transformed in your experience of it. All of the things you
normally would look for in a shoe, such as "Is it comfortable?,"
became unimportant, and you started asking a very different set of
questions: those of art.
And now that we hopefully all agree that anything somebody says
is art, is art indeed, there’s one more thing I have to tell
you:
This column here? – … it’s art!
Thomas Willmann is a German exchange student at the Musicology
Department. His column appears every other Tuesday. He says the new
album by Tori Amos is great art.
Thomas Willman
Comments to webmaster@db.asucla.ucla.edu