Arte Por Arte

Today I was engaged in a dialogue about art. Very quickly I established a position about art that I didn't want to (nor was I able to) defend, making me feel exceptionally pretentious and insincere. Somehow I got into talking about what is and is not art. I have thought about this before, and I know there have been things I do and do not call art, but to summarize and justify my criterion was an entirely different matter. Sure enough, I fumbled all over myself trying to think about it on the spot. By the end of that conversation, I was left unsatisfied with myself. And so, here is what I have come to realize since then.

Art is something relative to people. If an artist or an audience perceives it as that, then it is. For this reason, it is impossible to empirically define art. So for me, I think there is not so much art that is simply not art, but rather there is art I just cannot feel. Only that which nobody can consider art, is not art. This, no one can ever know. You can only pretend to know what is and is not art.

With that said, I think art is these things (and more):

It is action taken because emotion has compelled you to do so.

It is expression of thought that starts in your guts and touches your influence, all you have learnt, before it escapes from you through your skin and becomes beyond you.

It is ideology and vulnerability.

It is subjectivity eating objectivity.

It is being.

It is loving.

It is life's dissonances.

It is life's resolutions.

It is what every living person feels and does.

It is your best guess at what it is.