What is art?

(By the nice man at Pictures for Sad Children!)

I remember on a school trip to a museum, a friendly schoolmate asked me to define art in one word. I had overheard him asking that same query of several students around, all of which had responded with things like “expression” or “self-expression,” or “expressing yourself” (he had cheerfully punched that girl on the shoulder and chided at her that it was only one word).

I answered, “beauty.” Personally, a large piece of metal displayed as “abstract art” is something I just don’t agree with. A scribble or splatter is not art just because the creator claims to be expressing himself.

Communication is probably the greatest asset of humanity. To effectively get a message across, in any medium, is a great triumph for sure. But for it to also be an art, it must be beautiful!

But then who’s not to say that piece of metal is actually gorgeous? I’m sure the Baroque masters and today’s Minimalists would love to, if they were both alive in the same room, punch each other in the gut. Aesthetic ideals vary, and every person has their own way to interpret a piece much like they have their own way to look at the world. If X means a lot to a person, that person is inevitably going to think of any given piece in terms of X. Can you sniff out social justice in Dalí’s paintings? Someone out there does, and maybe they’re even writing academic papers about it!

Later on I asked my best friend that same question— to define art in one word— and she answered with “ego.” I think she’s hit the bull’s eye! An artist simply creates a piece from his personal ideals of beauty and meaning. If his goal is to impart a message, the message is based on his own convictions, too. And on top of that, the audience imposes their own values and ego on a piece when they observe it. (To quote Emerson, “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.”) In the end, every artist is an idealist. And pretention is just idealism when it needs a hug. (:

Ego, beauty, and expression. I think we can wrap everything up by throwing all three of them harmoniously together in a cool definition:

Though, since many of the the great geniuses of art were sadly unrecognized until two hundred and fifty years after their deaths, you could probably swap out effectively for ultimately. ):

Dreaming of the stars

The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it any wonder if, like a person who has just made a million at the casino, we feel strange and a little unreal?

Jacques Monod

The universe is vast. Deeply vast. Our Earth, which seems so big to us, would fit three times inside the famous red spot on Jupiter. And Jupiter’s quite a bit bigger than its red spot. I don’t need to illustrate this point— one needs only to look up at the night sky and realize that most of those little luminous dots are actually behemoths several hundred times than larger than our Sun, and that the distance between them would be hard to convey in mere objective language.

And then there’s the age. I’m only paraphrasing Michael Crichton here, but if the history of our planet so far were to be condensed into one twenty-four hour day, bacterial life wouldn’t evolve until quite a ways into the afternoon. The dinosaurs wouldn’t go exctinct until the last half hour. Mankind would arise less than a minute before midnight. And of course, our planet is young by universal standards.

If the universe is so big, and has existed for so long, shouldn’t scenarios like the one in our plannet be commonplace out of sheer statistical representation? (The mediocrity principle.) But there’s no evidence of contact with anyone else. It’s all silence. (This contradiction is known as the Fermi Paradox.)

The loneliness begs for the question: Just how likely was the evolution of life, really? The temperature was just right, the microbes struck a delicate balance and created a livable atmosphere. True to the nature of a chaotic system, if the slightest of deviations had ocurred we wouldn’t be here at all. But since outer space is so big and old, surely it’s not too unlikely for the same conditions to be replicated elsewhere, right? Is it just human pretention to think that we would be special?

Water and cellular respiration, carbon-based life—this is all that we know.  Forgive me if I’m missing something something fundamental, but what’s not to say there could be life elsewhere based off some other compound or chemical? And that it could get lucky, too, and somehow produce a beating heart, a tangle of nerves and this befuddling thing we call self-awareness.

And yet, regardless of what the odds really are and how many other planets win the evolutionary lottery or not, look at us. From a soup of bacteria we’ve risen to intelligence. The glory of the empires that conquered and fell, the primal struggles and the idealism of civilization, the might of reason and the holism of irrationality. They all mean nothing unless contemplated, so please take a moment sometime and dwell on it, just a little.

It really is kind of remarkable to find ourselves here.