What Is Art?
Art has been used throughout history to educate, inspire, challenge the status quo, and create positive social change. Whether it’s an oil painting, sculpture, sketch, or mixed-media project, artworks communicate ideas and emotions through line, space, shape, value, texture, color, and form. The term “art” can mean many things to different people, and its definition is constantly evolving as cultural and artistic styles change over time. In the past, art was primarily defined as a representation or imitation of something beautiful or meaningful. But today, art can be anything that is created with a specific purpose in mind, and often has a deeper meaning hidden within its surface. Some teachers of mankind—as Plato, and Aristotle, and the primitive Christians, and the Mahommedans—have even gone so far as to repudiate all art. These, however, have not understood the nature of art; they understand only a part of it, and not the whole thing. They are mistaken in judging it on the ground of gratification, which is only one of its characteristics; for this depends upon taste, and cannot furnish a criterion for a work of art. They also fail to understand that, in addition to gratification, it is the chief characteristic of a work of art that it infects men, who are capable of being so infected, with feelings of pleasure or disgust, or with pity, sorrow, courage, or despondency, arising out of the perception of beauty; and in this way unite the various parts of human nature into a common unity, demonstrating that all are sons of one Father. Attempts to define beauty by a comparison with nature, or by suitability of its object, or by symmetry or harmony, etc., are only attempts to supply a criterion for some artistic productions, and they do not reach the whole of what everybody has always held, and still holds, to be art. It is true that it was a great development when the art of representing the beauty of objects began to be cultivated, and that there has been a constant increase in this branch of artistic production. But it is equally true that there is no such thing as a “pure” and incontestable standard of beauty, or an absolute beauty, for the fact is that there are, and will continue to be, artistic productions which, although they lack this certain purity, may yet belong to the class of artistic work; for example, if a man who has felt, or imagined, feelings of fear, or of attraction to enjoyment, has expressed them so that others share them, and thus feel those feelings themselves, then they have produced a piece of art. And so with all the other emotions which may be evoked by beauty, and which are transmitted in some such manner.