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  • Thanks to LEGO® ART for supporting PBS.

  • We've long resisted offering any definition of art on this channel.

  • In my mind, Abrose Bierce was really onto something when he offered this entry in his

  • 1906 Devil's Dictionary: “art, n. This word has no definition.”

  • It's not that there aren't plenty of definitions out there, it's just that I find them lacking

  • in some way, or incomplete, or so watered down that they're meaningless.

  • Take Oxford's:

  • The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically

  • in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily

  • for their beauty or emotional power.”

  • Wait, human creative skill?

  • Do we really want to say other animals are incapable of making art?

  • And there are definitely artworks that I appreciate for neither their beauty nor their emotional power.

  • Like a Thomas Hirschhorn installation I can find thought-provoking, but not beautiful

  • or emotionally powerful, really.

  • To me, saying how you're supposed to respond confines the experience.

  • But is it impossible to define art?

  • Or worthwhile to try?

  • For a while now, I've been gathering quotes about art from a range of writers and artists

  • throughout history.

  • I'm going to share some of these with you in the hope that we might gain some understanding

  • of this nebulous idea called art, or that you might find a definition that resonates

  • for you.

  • I tend to be a fan of the ones that are intentionally enigmatic, like James Baldwin's:

  • The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers.”

  • I like that it leaves the boundaries really wide.

  • Like for me the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers confine art too much, like Seneca who said:

  • All art is but imitation of nature.”

  • Which he could maybe get away with saying about the art of his time, but just doesn't

  • hold up for me now, when I see, let's say, this wonderful work by Nam June Paik, Magnet

  • TV from 1965.

  • Aristotle set his terms a little more broadly, when he said:

  • Art completes what nature cannot bring to a finish.

  • The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends.”

  • Which I like for its proposal that art does something nature alone does not.

  • That art works from nature and extends it outward.

  • Because, let's face it, if there's a competition between the power of art and nature...

  • I'm sorry, art, it's just not really a contest.

  • I'm reminded of a quote often attributed to Marc Chagall:

  • Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding.”

  • But of course not all art is trying to compete with the beauty of flowers, nor simply reproduce

  • what's already around us.

  • As Paul Klee stated succinctly:

  • Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

  • Put another way by Bertold Brecht:

  • Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

  • It's the world-building aspect of art that many of us greatly enjoy, be it Toyin Ojih

  • Odutola's fictional portraits of aristocratic Nigerian families, or the immersive installations

  • of Helio Oiticica, or any other work whose new reality compels you, be it realistic or

  • completely abstract.

  • Artists have put forward objects and experiences that are unlike anything naturally occurring

  • in the world.

  • I like Chinua Achebe's description of art asman's constant effort to create for

  • himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

  • Because art after all, is not just a transporting device for those who experience it, but for

  • it's maker as well.

  • Twyla Tharp wryly observed that:

  • Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”

  • In the delightfully titled book Vague Thoughts on Art from 1911, John Galsworthy explains

  • it this way:

  • “... What is grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves,

  • with an itch to get outside ourselves.

  • And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from that itching,

  • a minute's profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement.”

  • And that brings us to my favorite explanations of art, which focus on this idea of art as

  • a means of exchange.

  • John Dewey wrote extensively about this, calling artthe most effective mode of communications

  • that exists.”

  • He explained:

  • The actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience.”

  • This, for me, is what art is all about.

  • An astoundingly skillful painting is great and all, but for me it becomes fully what

  • it is by being taken in by others.

  • And I don't even just mean human others, I think even penguins count!

  • In the words of James Turrell:

  • Art is a completed pass.

  • You don't just throw it out into the world-- someone has to catch it.”

  • Through art, we have the remarkable opportunity to step into the shoes of someone else for

  • a while, to see the world as they see it, or want to see it.

  • And in that process, we discover things about our own lives and worlds.

  • As Thomas Merton once said:

  • Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

  • Louise Bourgeois phrased it another way:

  • Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.”

  • For me, this means that not only can the artist recognize themselves in making the thing,

  • but that the appreciator can find some aspect of themselves in their experience of the thing.

  • Even an artwork that is centuries old can be made modern in the way it is recognized

  • and understood in the present.

  • And that brings us to one of the most famous aphorisms of all time: “Art is long, life

  • is short.”

  • Or in it's Latin translation from the original GreekArs longa, vita brevis.”

  • Now in its original context it's often thought to mean that life is short and technique or

  • craft can take a long time to perfect.

  • But it's most often invoked to say that art can last longer than the artist.

  • And art is usually designed or at least hoped to have a life independent of the artist.

  • I like the way Kerry James Marshall described his own aims in making:

  • What you're trying to create is a certain kind of an indispensable presence, where your

  • position in the narrative is not contingent on whether somebody likes you, or somebody

  • knows you, or somebody's a friend, or somebody's being generous to you.”

  • Like, there's the hope that any person's artworkswithout them being there to

  • talk about it or promote it or explain it.

  • Gerhard Richter once described art as the highest form of hope.

  • And it is indeed an act of extreme optimism and even vulnerability to create things that

  • we admit we want to outlast us.

  • I like how William Faulkner once explained this aspiration:

  • The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold

  • it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since

  • it is life.”

  • This is exactly how I feel when reading a book or looking at art or listening to music

  • from the past, thrown immediately and viscerally into a time and perspective different from

  • my own but no less real.

  • Through art, I recognize the humanity of countless other beings I'll never meet.

  • Nietzsche said:

  • Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, the deification of existence.”

  • Art tells me that other people really exist and existed in the past.

  • Which I know rationally, but only feel through art.

  • For me, also embodied in that statement is the way art can function for the artist as well.

  • I, in making something, affirm my own presence in the world.

  • There are many ways art performs this win/win function, serving both the artist and the

  • appreciator.

  • Sarah Sze described art as sustenance:

  • And it is sustenance for both artist and audience.

  • Dorothea Tanning said:

  • Art has always been the raft on to which we climb to save our sanity.”

  • And that is also true for both artist and audience.

  • I think too about this 1968 remark by Anni Albers:

  • “I have this very what you call today 'square' idea that art is something that makes you

  • breathe with a different kind of happiness.”

  • Which brings us to another aspect of art, a big one: art as expression, or an outing

  • of what is inside you.

  • Dorothy Parker once described art as a form of catharsis.

  • Or the releasing of emotions that yields some form of relief.

  • Now this can be a gentle kind of thing, like when Henry Ward Beecher wrote:

  • Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”

  • Or it can be a more violent affair.

  • Georg Baselitz said:

  • Art is visceral and vulgarit's an eruption.”

  • Which feels about right when you look at Baselitz's work, and also the work of many so-called

  • expressive painters.

  • I think we tend to associateexpressionwith BIG FEELINGS, but it really just depends

  • on who is doing the expressing and what is being expressed.

  • What is art?,” Edvard Munch asked, “Art grows out of grief and joy, but mainly grief.

  • It is born of people's lives.”

  • Oh, Munch.

  • We can tell it was mainly grief.

  • But this is another of art's remarkable capacities, to bend and adapt to the whims

  • and wills of its maker.

  • The artist Christo once said:

  • The work of art is a scream of freedom.”

  • And I love that for Christo and his collaborator Jeanne Claude, that was expressed not through

  • a literal scream or hectic jabs of paint, but through such breathtaking installations

  • as this monumental valley curtain from 1972.

  • And a work of art isn't always anexpression,” per se.

  • Sometimes it's the articulation of an idea not necessarily born of emotions.

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson described art as:

  • The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is art.”

  • And that's why, for Joseph Beuys:

  • Even the act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act.”

  • Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt explained to us how:

  • Ideas alone can be works of art….All ideas need not be made physical.…A work

  • of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's.

  • But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.”

  • Which reminds me of two other statements on art, one from Ed Ruscha:

  • Art has to be something that makes you scratch your head.”