Defining art. – Where does art begin?

Working at the ESSZIMMER and experiencing how different exhibitions and art can be, I asked myself at which point something can be called art. A great inspiration for this was also the contribution When is art, art? from 2016.

Art is a product of human culture, in every country and in every culture there is art in some form. A work of art is usually the result of a creative process, but it can also be the process itself. So how precisely can art be defined? Is it possible to evaluate art according to criteria?

Creativity and talent are fundamental components of artistic creation. Art is generally understood to be any activity or product performed by people with a communicative or aesthetic purpose – something that expresses an idea, a feeling or, more generally, a worldview. It encompasses a wide variety of human activities, creations, and forms of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture, and painting. If you want to determine whether something is really a work of art, you should not ask about the factually correct representation, but rather determine whether the work as a whole expresses the artist’s sensitivities and makes it possible to experience it.

Art in the most general sense means various processes aimed at a specific practical result. In this sense, the Greeks used the term techne, which describes the skill of a mason and that of a doctor or sculptor. They reserved the word mimesis for art that imitates nature. It was only in the modern age that art was freed from its technical meaning and turned to aesthetic meaning. The art of the engineer is not the same as that of the artist, who is dedicated to free creation and wants to express beauty. Liberal arts are generally divided into two categories: visual arts, such as architecture, sculpture, and painting, and performing or contemporary arts, such as music, dance, and poetry. In addition, modernity has added a seventh subject: film.

Philosophy generally looks at art from two perspectives: From the point of view of its creation, it asks whether certain rules or the creative genius of the artist are decisive. From its perspective of perception, philosophy is interested in the extent to what can be standardized and whether a work of art can represent the soul of the viewer. However, the contemporary thought challenges this traditional approach: ugliness and banality become aesthetic categories, taste becomes the subject of sociological study. Since then, the question has no longer been: “What is art?”, but: “When will something become art?”

Art is something subjective, nobody can say whether everyone sees the same thing as the artists themselves. The concept of art is still controversial and open to diverse interpretations; so everything can be art, but nothing has to be art. There is no absolute standard of evaluation, only a subjective one – which many people may share. So art cannot be defined uniformly for everyone.