What is Art?

I was reading the Rationally Speaking blog post about aesthetics and performance art, which poses the question "what is art?" I thought it was a good question to try to answer.

I would define art as the creation of beauty through intelligence. Beauty being visual, aural, olfactory, tactile, or even emotional. An underlying assumption of this definition is that the appreciation of art depends on a common experience of beauty, and sufficient intelligence to interpret our experience of the art object or performance (i.e. to extract its meaning).

I am a proponent of the theory Steven Pinker explains in “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”. Briefly, Pinker theorizes that our sense of beauty is universal, evolved as a reproductive advantage, and equates to an attraction to goodness in nature: e.g. genetically healthy mates, verdant, fertile landscapes. Of course that doesn’t mean that only landscapes and nudes are beautiful! And that points to the intelligence needed for the creation and appreciation of art.

The ability to extract content and meaning from a phenomenon, and then communicate it, are the aspects of intelligence that seem most relevant to the creative process. While landscapes and nudes aren’t the only subjects of artistic expression, they are among the works that are universally appreciated. But I included emotional beauty in my list because there seems to be a category of art that fails to meet any standard of visual, aural or olfactory beauty, and yet is appreciated for the emotional response it engenders. I’m not aware of a source that has classified emotions as beautiful versus not, but I think most people will know what I mean when I refer to my heart swelling, or a feeling of poignancy, or bliss, or glee, or contentment, or reverence. I think all of these are beautiful emotions, although in some cases they might be responses to things that are not visually beautiful. Poignancy in particular might more often be the response to dissonance. I’m sure there are additional emotional reactions to presumptively ugly things that could be considered beautiful.

On the other hand, there are emotional reactions that I don’t think would be classified as beautiful, and whose creation should not be the object of artistic expression. These would include fear, revulsion, and grief, among others. The reaction I’m not quite sure how to classify is shock. That seems to be the object of many art works, but is not uniformly perceived as worthy of being designated art. I’m reserving my judgment and would be interested in opinions on either side.