Back to the Age Old Question: What Is Art?

It used to be obvious. Or so it seemed. Art galleries, collectors and museums preserved and displayed the art from each generation. In the past century a breakdown occurred, and over time it no longer became clear what was and was not considered art. Warhol's Brillo Boxes contributed.

"Doubles, With Baseboard" -- 12"x 16" Oil on Panel, Frank Holmes

I woke the other day thinking about a gallery in which lumber had been stacked in the middle of the room as one of the pieces of art in an exhibition there. The question being asked, I believe, is whether the same lumber stacked behind Menard's would be considered art, or does it only become art when stacked in a museum or gallery?

I remember seeing Warhol's Brillo boxes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They looked strikingly out of place, as if the janitor had put them down at the top of the stairs and forgot to go back and pick them up. Duchamp's famous urinal is also here in this same museum.

These latter two examples exemplify the post-modern ethic of questioning authority. Who decides what is art and not art? Who decided what is good and bad art? At one time print making was a craft outside of the realm of fine art. When is it sculpture and when is it simply ornamental embellishment?

As one reviewer stated regarding an Arthur Danto book, "Being an artist this question is never far from my mind on a daily basis." I myself can't say it is a daily question, but it certainly has been a recurring one. (Check out my 2012 posts related to this topic: Culture or Trash and It's Interesting, But Is It Art?)

While rummaging through listings on Amazon.com about this theme I came across a book carrying the same title as that last blog post, But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland. The book looks interesting and one of the comments on its subject matter is by Arthur C. Danto himself: "I know of no work that moves so swiftly and with so sure a footing through the battle zones of art and society today."

"Doubles" -- Oil on Panel, Frank Holmes

When one travels through quotes about art, one more often finds quotes about the feelings art generates than a definition of what art is. Here are some examples.

"Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity."
Leo Tolstoy, in an essay "What Is Art?

"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
Oscar Wilde

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."
Thomas Merton

These kinds of quotes inspire artists, but avoid the black-and-white definitions that dogmatists are hoping for, and many artists don't really care all that much about how art gets defined as long as they are able to do, to produce, whatever it is that is striving to emerge from within. It doesn't always have to be beautiful, but it does seem necessary for the public to trust that the art is sincere or authentic, though maybe the only arena that matters is the one in which the artist herself or himself stands before the blank canvas -- or blank sheet of paper -- and does battle alone.

Georgia O'Keeffe stated, "Filling a space in a beautiful way. That's what art means to me." But what about the artist striving to reflect the world, whose vision of the world is its horror?

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Well, this is a discussion best left for another day. It's too big of a question for the small amount of time I have at this moment...

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it.

Art Credit: Paintings by American artist Frank Holmes, winner of 1973 Prix de Rome.

The Painted Absurd

I originally saw excerpts from Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word in Harper’s magazine. (I may still have a copy of that issue in my garage.) His cannon blasts against the absurdities which have presented themselves as “art” in the past half century were deafening. My guess is that some people celebrated and many were appalled, but for sure it became a stimulating read for at least one former art student, myself.

Wolfe essentially relates and dissects the process by which the art world evolved from visual artists creating paintings and sculptures to conceptual artists who had no product whatsoever except the theories surrounding what they were “saying.”

The argument culminates thus: "…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes.… Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until…it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory!…Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.”

Many young art students loved it because it did not require any skills to make “art” any more. You just had to have a cool idea that was communicated in a manner in which other people “got it.” Or twist your head around the zeitgeist of wonderfully new ideas like “ugly is beautiful” and “talentlessness is talent.”

The opening lines of my 1980’s short story Terrorists Preying, which in 2008 was translated into French, summarize some of my feeling about my personal struggle with these issues:

Although I'd been an art major in college -- mostly painting and drawing -- I became discouraged with it shortly after graduation and gave it up. I was living with my family on Long Island at the time and for some while afterwards still visited the New York art galleries, making regular tours of the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Modern.

What finally got me out of art was the whole directionlessness of it all. No one seemed to know what art was about any more. DuChamp started it, of course, with his Readymades. It took the rest of the world a half century to catch on. Everything was art, the critics were saying. For myself, their steel-firm logic stubbornly taunted everything I'd built my life around, leaving me creatively disabled, impotent, and broken down. In the end, I became the essence of minimalism, and ceased to exist.

Eventually every creative artist wrestles with how much to play the game. Each alone must decide for him/herself who they are and what they are about. For me, my fine arts background has blended into the foundations that support my advertising career, but on the side I still make “art” for various purposes, both illustrative and therapeutic. And I also continue to follow the arts scene by visiting galleries and reading magazines like Art News, ArtForum and Art in America among others.

Which leads me to this article that I stumbled on about conceptual artist James Lee Byars. (Nov. 2008 Art in America) Frankly, I never heard of him, but he was someone influential who did some big work which evidently seemed important to someone (most assuredly the critics whom Wolfe lambasted.) The article asks an interesting question: when your art career produces no product, what have you left for posterity?

Thomas McEvilley, author of the piece "James Lee Byars, A Study of Posterity", wrote, "Though James Lee Byars has been increasingly identified since his death, with elegant, reductive objects, his most radical-and characteristic-works were ephemeral and even immaterial." In short, Byars perfectly exemplifies what Wolfe in 1979 was talking about.

To be honest, my college art career began with philosophy classes. After three or four, I felt that since philosophy leaves no product, I should make art, which was also philosophical but left you with something to look at afterwards. Besides, I'd been drawing all my life since my classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art when I was five. The irony is that artists likewise went the way of the philosophers… at least, those who bought into the notions of Happenings and Conceptual Art as the next evolution.

If you’re interested in a good short read that answers the important question, How did we get from Rembrandt to a guy painting seal skins white and nailing them to his apartment wall in Boston? Pick up a copy of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word.