What is Art?

Tolstoy once asked, “What is Art?” Then he wrote a whole book trying to answer the question.

And so did myriads of other people. As a matter of fact, people have been trying to answer the question for at least 3000 years or more. That means I’ll not even come close to answering the question in a short blog post; but raising the question for our own weekend ponderment could be interesting.

In Tolstoy’s work, he explained that the most common answer to his question is “Art is architecture, sculpture, painting, music, [and] poetry in all its forms.” But here is another problem. Say we take architecture as an example; not all buildings are works of art. Some are just functional and some are even ugly. And the same is true for all the rest of the forms mentioned. So art can’t just be anything that is made. 

Using our illustration in architecture, we must then discover a standard in architecture that distinguishes architectural works of art from, say, a beaver’s dam. Ah! Says the artist in the know: “Art must be an activity which manifests beauty.” Now we’re getting closer. But are we?

How does one define beauty? And if we do find a satisfactory definition, who is capable of analyzing the work of art to see if it meets the standard. Isn’t beauty just in the eye of the beholder? 

There are some who would argue that “Art has nothing to do with beauty and that a lot of art is shocking and ugly.” They would further argue that art has its value in those very qualities of being shocking and ugly, that “art is simply a means by which we reconcile reason with the ineffable. To the extent that an artist can do this, therein lies greatness.”

But suppose we go with the idea that art is an activity that manifests beauty. How will we define it? Shall we define it as ‘the good made visible’ as John Paul II did in Letter to Artists? Or should we stick with Aquinas’s definition of “things that give pleasure when they are perceived?” Aquinas is helpful because he further qualifies his definition using the qualities of integrity (inner consistency), proportion, and clarity. 

But, then again, as Mortimer J. Adler points out, there is also the matter of taste (as opposed to truth) and talent in identifying beauty. Riffing off of Aristotle, he notes that some people have not developed their taste sufficiently enough to discern what is beautiful.

Take a child, for example, who would prefer his mac-n-cheese and wieners over a quality cut of meat finely cooked any day of the week. And what about the “connoisseurs” of art who wouldn’t know a Goya from a Bruegel, a Rembrandt from a Monet, or a Cézanne from a Warhol. Are these modern “art aficionados” qualified to judge what is beautiful, let alone explain what is art?

By now, as you can see, we haven’t gotten very far defining beauty or explaining what is art. It’s much easier said than done, apparently.

But as a humane society, we must. We must strive to answer such questions if we are to remain a humane society. Otherwise, the Robert Mapplethorpe’s of the world will power their socially constructed definitions into established ways of defining art and beauty.

Returning to Tolstoy, he burdens us with responsibility saying, “it is necessary to know whether all that passes for art is indeed art, and whither all that is art is good… and if it is good, whether it is important and worth the sacrifices demanded for its sake.”

For me, I choose to lean on Aquinas for my definition of Beauty: pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent. (That which is pleasing when seen/perceived [with the mind] is called beautiful.) And art? I hold with Francis Schaeffer that “an art work can be a doxology in itself…[and] there is a very real sense in which the Christian life itself should be our greatest work of art” (Cf. Ephesians 2:10). 

But what is art, then, properly speaking? Stephen Tennant in commenting on Willa Cather’s writing says, 

Art is not life, and it is not a substitute for it, or an aggrandizement of a dubious reality. It is a necessary commodity—compacted of many realities and fantasies, unrealities and dreams, which the artist commands and respects. It is a method, the only one, of preserving the beauty of transient things, the wonder of youthful happiness, the pleasures of controversy, wit, and enterprise, and the finer aspects of intellectual discovery, in an enduring and pleasing form.