What Is Art? Maybe It’s Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man.

The question “What is art?” seems to me to be in the same category as “What is God?”.  Nobody knows, and anybody that claims to is full of shit, in my opinion, man.

It’s kind of like Jaron Lanier wrote in the book we’re currently reading for Theory and Audience Analysis, I Am Not A Gadget:

“What is a person?  If I knew the answer to that, I might be able to program an artificial person in a computer.  But I can’t.  Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith.”

Why would you even want to define art?  Why not just experience it, enjoy it, or better yet, make it?  Why do we humans think we have to nail everything down?

Most of what people have to say about art is completely subjective anyway.  In the words of Lebowski (aka, The Dude), “maybe that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”  That’s what most art commentary boils down to.

However, having just gone on that rant, the question “Why is it important?” leads to perhaps a good reason why we should think more about what art is.  Not as some sort of ivory tower academic question, but more in the sense of if we don’t know what it is, how can we protect it, in a world that increasingly can’t recognize it?

Because if we don’t value art, terrible things can happen.  Years ago, I interviewed Durham’s jazz diva Nneena Freelon, and I asked her basically the same question (why is art important?).  I never forgot what she said, and went to find the article because I wanted to re-read it for this blog post.  She fights for arts to be in the schools more, to stop all the arts cuts that are going on in public schools today:

“We’ve got a whole generation growing up that doesn’t understand beauty, doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t feel called towards it.  You can ruin a whole planet if you don’t value beauty.  You just pave over everything.”

She also spoke of the value of art beyond just the art itself.  Music teaches us how to listen–not only to composition, but to each other.  Plenty of studies have shown how music helps our brains learn math and improves all sorts of cognitive functions (memory, etc.).

The things you learn, she told me, go way beyond art; it has to do with how you see the world, and the ability to problem solve with imagination:

“It’s my personal opinion that if we had people in power who had access to their imaginations, we would not have been fighting in Iraq (Note:  this is when Bush was president).  Because we only saw two possible solutions:  peace or war.  Nobody was using their imagination as to how we can solve problems.  That’s what the arts bring us.”