I'm re-posting this earlier entry so that it’s current on Aesthesis for a follow-up article. It also gives me the chance to correct a couple of typos. Be forewarned, I have not altered any of the web links. They are the same as when I originally published the article (2004-04-30 11:10:10) so they may or may not work.
Objectives, solutions, criticisms, and discernments are impossible without definitions. You can’t create a car if you don’t know what a car is. You can’t evaluate which car is better if you don’t have a good definition of what cars are.
Christians are called upon to discern (Heb. 5:14) and to approve (Phil 1:10) the things we find to be excellent. This command is not limited to spiritual matters so we can assume that it includes art. It is impossible to know which art works are excellent without a good definition of what excellent art is.
Christian or not, everyone is responsible to make the best use they can of their brains.
For any future definition to have value it must address the issues of the past by affirmation, synthesis, or contradiction. Theorists of the past have made assertions about art that conflicted with one another. Two mutually exclusive definitions of art cannot coexist and equal truths. Instead the assertions of the past have to be weighed against one another. Truths must be sifted from among error. Subjectivity must be burned away to reveal a workable definition. In this way, the potentially confusion of past contradiction becomes a launch pad for relevant meaning.
Just to get and idea of how art has been defined I turned as I often do to Google.
The beauty of Google isn’t accuracy. The information it finds might be out of date, misleading or poorly worded. The beauty of Google is volume. Based on the volume of hits you get on a given topic, you can make some fairly reliable generalizations about the common perception of a given topic.
It could be argued that, since only a minority of the world adds content to the web, you cannot use a Google search to generalize about what a majority of people are thinking. I think it is safe however to say that Google at least gives a good idea of what internet users think on a given topic.
With this idea in mind I used Google’s reference tools using the “definitions” and “thesaurus” functions. These reference tools approximate an accepted academic definition. On the second layer I put results from pages created by individuals or non academic institutions – kind of a public opinion survey.
The search “define: art” yielded accepted definitions from mostly-reputable sources like Princeton, Oregon State as well as from questionable sources like www..com. (I know very little about angelicinspirations but based on their definition of art, I doubt I will use my time to find out more about them.)
Already difficulties appear in the definition process. While many of the entries were interesting and valuable, several were based on acronyms. epregnancy.com for instance defined art as “All treatments or procedures that involve the handling of human eggs and sperm for the purpose of establishing a pregnancy. Types of ART include IVF, GIFT, ZIFT, embryo cryopreservation, egg or embryo donation, and surrogate birth.” Cisco defined art like this. “1. audible ringing tone. A signal sent back to the calling party to indicate the called number is ringing. 2. administrative reporting tool. A web-based application for Cisco CallManager that generates reports on performance and service details. See also CDR and CMR.”
Others defined the word based on its use in a specific vocational field. In printing for instance art can be “Any photograph, map or illustration used in preparing a job for printing.” (imcprint.com) or “All illustrations used in preparing a job for printing” (nap.edu). In book collecting “art is the trade abbreviation for artificial and is used to describe certain book binding materials” (Collectbooks.about.com)
Other definitions are specific to a genre or movement in art. If you’ve been asking yourself “What is Critical Postmodern Art” then look no further, milforded.org has an answer for you.
Once these off-the-track definitions have been weeded out we are left with two basic scholastic definitions.
Most definitions focused on either the process or the physical object of art. Princeton divided their definition into three components that summarize fairly well the basic definition of Art.
the products of human creativity; works of art collectively; "an art exhibition"; "a fine collection of art" (Here)
the creation of beautiful or significant things; "art does not need to be innovative to be good"; "I was never any good at art"; "he said that architecture is the art of wasting space beautifully" (Here)
a superior skill that you can learn by study and practice and observation; "the art of conversation"; "it's quite an art" (Here)
Princeton’s definition brings out the difference between the noun and verb forms of the word art.
How useful is their definition? How supportable? It may not matter.
Another definition reads
[art] divides into psychological (personal) and visionary (collective). Art can never be reduced to psychopathology because visionary art is greater than its creator and draws on primordial images and forces. It stands on its own merits. It compensates for the one-sidedness of an era. Rather than a symptom or something secondary, it's a true symbolic expression, a reorganization of the conditions to which a causalistic explanation reduces it. (Here)
This second definition minimizes both process and product of art and focuses on the social purpose of art.
Google is great at telling what people have thought about a topic. The googler (is that a word yet?) can see that process, product, and purpose have all been issues that past art-theorists have had to grapple with. Whatever happened in the past, future art theorists must come to grips with these three issues.
Google is not authoritative on the meaning of any topic, but it can help you to see what other’s think about it. If Google isn’t a vast mine of data to be processed it is a least a shovel to dig into the internet. It may not tell you the meaning of everything but it can atlas past thinking about it. Don’t take it’s answers for granted but listen to them as you would to any individual. The answers it gives, after all, are the collected answers of individuals everywhere.