I have an idea about art. I haven’t read a single thing about the philosophy of art, but I’ve read books and looked at paintings, so I’m pretty sure I’m at least kinda qualified for some exploratory surgery.

My idea is this: “Art”, whatever it is, isn’t a physical thing in the material world. It isn’t a property that you apply to a physical thing, either. “Art” as I understand it is a part of the human experience that can only kind of be described, at least with my skillset, but I’ll go ahead and try anyway: “Art” is what happens in the mind of The Audience when they look at something that reflects back at them some aspect of their own experience of the world.

I know that sounds weird and kind of abstract, so with your (The Audience’s) permission, I’d like to explore the space of art and how this definition applies to it, and how it informs our interpretation of art.

The natural place to start, I think, is to test the extremes of this definition and see how and if it informs our interpretations.

Modern Art, or perhaps more accurately, Postmodern Art, is perhaps the easiest thing to get mad about as a bystander. A banana duct-taped to the wall? A pair of sunglasses dropped on the floor? A severed, rotting cow’s head being eaten by flies? What do any of these have in common with The Mona Lisa, or Guernica, or Pietà, or The Old Man and the Sea, or Do not go gentle into that good night, or Cello Suite no. 1, or even Voodoo child? All of these pieces, despite their medium, or their defiance of medium, are unified by their shared reflection of the human experience back directly into the soul of the audience.

To take one example: the sunglasses. At some point I picked up a probably apocryphal tale of modern art gone awry: Someone once dropped their sunglasses in the corner at the Louvre (Or the Tate, I can never remember which), and it became in impromptu exhibit, with crowds of onlookers shuffling past, with much furrowing of brows and beneath-the-breath comments, before the owner of the lost sunglasses realized what had happened and went and grabbed them and stuck them back in the neck of his t-shirt. My contention here, probably controversially, is that in that moment, the sunglasses on the floor really were art. Or rather, more precisely, they made “Art” happen in the minds of the Audience: they saw in the sunglasses (literally, for some of them) a reflection of themselves, or some slice of their experience of the world. Whether they were put there on purpose or not doesn’t have any bearing on whether the experience of the Audience was “Artistic” or not.

Now, of course, we have to acknowledge set and setting here, as well. This probably fictional Audience is at the Louvre, some of them have probably been looking forward to this visit for months, and they could not be more primed to find the “Artistic” reflection in anything you put in front of them. Does this mean then that anything if observed through a lens shaped to find “Art” will genuinely be art? Yes. The plastic shopping bag dancing in the wind really is art. And the video of it is a different piece of art. And when you share it with someone, and share how it made you feel, that’s yet another piece of art that is becoming, at this point, so abstracted that its relationship to the bag itself is becoming almost irrelevant. Nonetheless, these are all in a fuzzy, squishy, easily-burst-bubbly way, art, because they cause “Art” to happen in the mind of the Audience, if the Audience merely looks for the reflection.

The opposite extreme, then: The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Possibly the most famous, most obviously titanically skill-expressive pieces of art in the history of mankind. To call it merely evocative is insulting. But what if nobody ever beheld it? What if Michelangelo spent all those years working on it, but in complete secrecy, and when he was finished, destroyed it before another soul could ever see his work. Is it still “Art”? is it still art?

My answer, again, is yes, on both counts. To understand the answer to this question, I think we only have to consider the artist as the first Audience. The artist, from his first brushstroke, or sentence written, or note composed, is considering the piece through the very same lens as the Audience. The artist looks for a reflection of himself in the piece with every brushstroke, and if he is good, considers with every brushstroke how he might make the piece more reflective. The artist is creator, yes, but he is also Audience.

But what do we mean by ‘good’ here? Must a good artist be particularly gifted in the craft of his medium? Does this apply to art as well? Must good art be maximally reflective? Does it matter what art reflects, and does what it reflect make it good or bad? Must good artists choose what reflections to emphasize in their art, and must a good artist use his skill at his craft to emphasize these reflections? Can good art be made by bad artists? Must the thing that is reflected into the Audience be what was intended by the artist? If the Audience at large and the artist disagree about what their art reflects most, what bearing does that have on how well the artist executed his vision? Does that make it necessarily good or bad?

These are only a few of the questions that I have about this topic that I WILL explore in greater detail, because I really find this stuff fascinating. But now it’s late, and I’m way late already, so look forward to an expansion of this one in the near future as a non-daily-diarrhea.