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What is Art?
Is it a banana 🍌 taped to a wall?
The beauty found in nature?
Is it exclusivity and rarity? Or is it inclusivity1 and shared appreciation?
Is it graffiti coloring concrete in an exuberance of rebellion?
Is art the artist?
Does the art stand alone, judged solely by its own merits?
Is it the message behind the art? Or is it the individual experience of observing, inhabiting, and feeling art?
Is it the mark left behind by someone who refuses to go quietly into that dark night?
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.2
Is art paint splattered on canvas, words crawling across page, or lyric and rhyme keeping time to the beat of the bass drum?
Is it a thousand collectors paying one dollar or one collector paying one thousand dollars?
Is it determined by the few or by the many?
Is it the journey and the process or is it the destination?
Is it the blood, sweat, and tears that go into producing that final result?
Is art the struggle?
Is art giving all and leaving nothing behind to give?
Is it the intense creative endeavor and imaginative insight of the lone artist toiling away? Or is it the work of a team collaborating to produce something great?
Is art supposed to be hard? Or can it be easy? Is easy art any less valuable than art produced through great effort?
Is art the way light reflects upon water, sunlight filtering through dancing clouds, or birdsong bringing music to nature? Is art the sound of a newborn laughing for the first time?
Is art beauty?
Is it the impact we leave upon others? The impact we leave on the planet? Is art that which stands the test of time? Is art what we make of it?3
Is it beauty in a vacuum or beauty admired by many in a crowded room?4
Is art permanence or can it be fleeting and transitory?
Is art that which came before influencing young minds into creating their own art?
Is art originality? Or is it adherence to tradition?
Is art what inspires?
Is art simultaneously all of these things and none of these things? Yes.
Is art paradox and contradiction? Is it beauty in the broken and the downtrodden? Is it the perfect form, straight line, golden ratios, and the ephemeral nature of the divine? Yes.
What is art to you? What inspires you to create art?
Why art?
Want to discuss art and what it means to you? I’m interested in what you have to say. Join me in the chat.
According to grammarly and the dreaded red line, inclusivity is not an actual word, while exclusivity is one, so I am coining the word inclusivity.
From The Poems of Dylan Thomas, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1952, 1953 Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1937, 1945, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1967 the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946, 1971 New Directions Publishing Corp. Used with permission. (https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat