Asking The Right Questions About Art

Over the years, I've had many conversations about art in many different venues, while I was in high school and college studying it, as I've spoken to people in person and on the internet about it, and as I've read and responded to books and articles about it. My view of art, what it is, and how to look at it has changed quite a bit over my lifetime, and although my current view may be unorthodox or even heretical to some, it makes the most sense of anything I’ve heard or read about art to this point in my life. Here it is: It doesn’t matter what art is. “What is art?” is an irrelevant question.

In college, it was a question that I ran into constantly, and one of my art professors had his own definition of art that he was continuously revising. I don't recall exactly what his definition was, but I do remember never really agreeing with it, though I knew he had and continued to put a lot of thought into it. I tried to come up with a definition of art myself, and never really succeeded in creating one that I was satisfied with. At a certain point, however, I decided that I was through with it. I realized that it doesn’t matter. Trying to come up with a definition for such a nebulous thing as art is a fruitless endeavor. There are three reasons for this: One, because it seems like these days anything anyone wants to call art can be; Two, because it often just seems like a label that is placed on something in order to tell us that we should care about it; and three, it seems like a way for some people to dismiss things they don’t like by saying something isn’t art. The latter two are, obviously, quite related.

The crux of the problem, therefore, seems to be that we’re asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking if something is art, we ought to actually discuss the piece and see what it means to us and what it does for us. Then we can begin to actually interact and engage with the piece. Asking whether we can or should give an arbitrary label to a thing isn't engaging with the piece in front of us. Rather, it's ignoring the piece entirely and having a discussion about something unrelated to it.

In order to frame our questions about art around actual pieces of art, over the years I've come up with a few different questions that could be asked. When I first started thinking about this, I decided that the question "Is it any good?" might be preferable, because that seemed to be the real question people were asking when they asked if something was art. "It's not art" was basically an expression of distaste, so instead of discussing art in the abstract it might be better to just discuss what it was about the piece that they didn't like.

After all, art is subjective, because as I said anything can be art if someone wants it to be. Poo in a can is art. Video games are art. Nature is art. Mass produced items are art. Anything is art according to someone. If people are using art basically as a label that really means “This is good” or “This is bad,” then it stands to reason that we ought to stop asking if it's art and just ask whether something is good or bad.

This seems fine on its face, but I still wasn't really satisfied with it. It seemed too vague and too open to interpretation. For a short while I toyed with "Do you like it?" being a better question, in order to remove the subjectivity of it. Whether something is good or not is debateable, whereas it's impossible to argue personal taste, and the question actually engages with the work rather than being abstract. However, I think I've settled on something even better than that:

"Is it worth my time to engage with this work?"

I realized that much of the debate surrounding art and whether something is art or not revolves not necessarily around what someone thinks of something, or which parts of it they like or don't like, but whether or not they even want to take the time to discover what it is they think about it at all. Discussing art is all about engaging with it, but what if someone doesn't even want to engage with it in the first place? Is it even worth the time to engage with at all? This seems to be a much better, more complete question, because if something isn't even worth the time to discuss, we don't have to. We can move beyond it to something else that we do want to discuss.

This seems to be something that those who label something as "art" are saying anyway. By calling something art, they're saying that yes, this is worth your time. You should take the time to engage with it. You should form opinions about it. You should decide whether you like it or not. By the same token, others who would deride something as "not art" are saying the opposite: this isn't worth it. Don't take any time thinking about this.

So that's where I've settled for now. I've been using this question to engage with art for a few years now and I like it. Maybe just like my college art professor was constantly revising his definition of art, I'll end up revising my "best question to ask about art," but for now I think this works very well.