What is Art?

GTW: Hey baby, I need you to do me a favor.

GF: What?

GTW: I need a topic to write a quick blog about. I'm trying to keep an unbroken string of postings for at least a little while. So, just give me a topic, or ask me an interesting question, or really do anything that will give me something to work with.

GF: Hmmm... how about, “What is Art?” and “Is Art Art?”

GTW: Yeah, that will work.

GF: Also I burn with desire for you as you are capable of arousing my primitive sexual desires because you are a strong, sexy son of a bitch with a devil-may-care attitude and a biting wit.

GTW: I know.

Question 1: What is Art?

Nature is whatever exists as part of our world – and it is finite. There are limited possibilities, limited concepts, limited configurations of concepts in the world. Nature, as it relates to Art, is something like a palette as well as a model. Art utilizes what we find in Nature to create pictures inspired by Nature, pictures that look at Nature, and pictures that stylistically distort Nature. All Art is a picture of remixed Nature.

To explain this, let me clarify my use of the word “picture” or “model.” I do not here mean that I am only referring to the visual arts, when I use the word “picture” I am referring to a construct whose parts relate to one another in a way that is analogous to what it is a picture of. For example, suppose that we have a tree and then suppose that we have a digital image of a tree: the digital image is an image of a tree because the pixels are arranged so that they relate to one another spatially in the same way that light in nature reflected off of the tree. For another example, imagine a man and a painting of the man: the painting will consist of darker shades of flesh tones that relate to the lighter shades of flesh tones within the painting in the same way that the mans illuminated flesh relates to his shadowed flesh.

Art is made up of that which is found in nature. There is nothing that is transcendent in art. Certainly there are fantastic elements in art, but fantastic elements are just mundane elements combined in a way that we do not actually find in nature; such as combining trees, sentience, and automotion to create Ents or combining the humanoid shape along with bat wings, leathery skin, and horns to create a folksy devil. One can find non-natural configurations in art, but you will never find a non-natural basic concept.

All Art is a picture of remixed Nature.

Nature can be “remixed” by altering its proportions. Visually this is like imagining people with heads that are 50% their total body mass; emotionally this is like imagining a world where people have romantically intense experiences for 90% of their waking life. The base concepts remain the same, it is only their relations which are altered. Likewise, novel configurations of concepts would be a remixing of nature such as the “fantastic elements” I mentioned above. These remixes exist in the minds of the artists, they are the results of the artists perceiving the world and then mentally tweaking proportions and recombining elements.

An artist can then use some artistic medium to create pictures of these remixed perceptions. This could be words, paints, photosensitive material, digital environments, binary code, or anything else that offers sufficient variables that these remixed perceptions can be sketched. The degree to which reality can be remixed is limited by the medium: anything that can be sensibly conceived is verbally expressible, photography on the other hand requires that the artist not stray too far from real life physics (you know, barring just using Photoshop)

Question 2: Is Art Art?

Yes.

A = A so Art = Art.