When I take students to an art museum, I often encounter a simple mistake about what art is. Namely, students will insist that art (and especially visual art) be beautiful. They insist on this to the degree that they can't imagine calling something "art" if they don't perceive it to be beautiful. I have never been at a museum with students at which I did not hear one ask, "Can ugly pictures be Art?"
Heated objections leap out of these beauty-philes when, after sighing and gasping their way through rooms filled with clearly beautiful paintings, they come to the last room in the Getty's permanent collection and are confronted by the wall-sized "Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889," stuffed with putrid greens and fleshy reds, puking or pooping people, and skull-headed citizens, all inhabiting a dirty city street based on lumpy, skewed proportions.
Bleah. I think they're right: it's an ugly painting. I've tried to bring myself to understand it as beautiful for quite a few hours on multiple visits, and I haven't had success yet. Who knows? Maybe I'll learn to see it later. I'm comforted in my failures, however, by a pretty firm belief that the artist meant it to be repulsive. He painted an ugly painting with full knowledge of its ugliness, and now it gets to sit in Los Angeles, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting high schoolers.
So here comes the pounced-on pupil's pregnant pregunta: "Is this Art?"
The answer, simply, is, "Yes." Some good art is ugly. But it takes a whole lot more than a simple assertion (however forcefully typed) to disentangle the confusion that led to questions like the ones above, so I'll take a stab at disentangling it below. Those questions often stem from some simple mistakes both about art and about beauty, but I'll save talking about beauty for another time. Let's talk, for now, about art.
What Is Art, Anyway?
Allow me a cheap argument to start this off. The following is a pretty good rule of thumb when categorizing items into 'art' and 'not-art': If it's in an art museum, made by an artist, curated by an art historian, then it's art. I'd even go so far to say that if it's only one of those, then it probably counts!
Like I said, that argument is cheap; it's nothing more than an argument from authority. But human authority, while never foolproof, is a pretty good guide in professional circles. You wouldn't go to the Indie 500 and ask whether a car was, in fact, "racing." It's strange to walk into an art museum and ask whether its contents are "art." For that even to begin to be responsible, you should have a reason for your skepticism that is at least as apparently strong as the accumulated opinions of lots of experts.
More likely than not, your question shouldn't be "Does this object fit into my idea of what counts as art?" so much as it should be "Is my idea of what counts as art refined enough to include this object?"
Maybe this will be helpful: I’m afraid that lots of people think about art like they think about couches– as things that should fill one's space and give one comfort. Magazines give us endless pictures of art-bedecked walls painted in delicate shades of "blush," "coral," or "atomic vomit green." HGTV smiles us into assumptions about the accessorization of one's private little castle. We are left thinking (whether we ought to or not) about chairs and canvases as means to the end of domestic bliss. Don't get me wrong: I rabidly rush through Real Simple in checkout lines and was a long-time devotee of HGTV when I didn't have to pay the cable bill ("Divine Design," anyone?). It's just that most art you'll run into in museums has been put there because it was made to be (or came to be considered to be) an end in itself, and not simply a means to any one person's pleasure.
Here's my suggestion: Instead of thinking about art like you think about couches, you should try thinking about art like you think about books. You know, books–repositories of human thought and sentiment communicated via written language.
It would be sad if we only had happy story books. It would be very sad if we only had philosophical treatises. It's happy, on the other hand, that we're constantly working on writing books about just about everything in human experience (and then some), because it turns out that the written word is a potent medium through which humans can explore, explain, and adorn the world. Art, I'll suggest, is another such medium. It would be sad if we only had pretty pictures. It would be very sad if we only had visual satire. It's happy that artists make both, because art is another medium for the potent exploration, explanation, and adornment of everything.
And that just about corners me into producing something that resembles a definition of art, so here's one that's useful: Art is a tradition of valuable, primarily visual manmade objects that are in strong, meaningful relationships with each other. The tradition aspires to interact with everything in the world, so its contents can have purposes as numerous as there are things in the world to interact with. It's a grand repository of human thought, sentiment, and activity presented through media that are capable of expressing things in a different way than language does.
I'll re-say what I suspect is most helpful in the above paragraphs: Art can exist for many good purposes, and beauty is only one of them. When this year's students went to the Getty or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, we handed them a card with a list of seven likely purposes for which pieces of art are made. I'll list them here.
1. Art can be made to stun the viewer
2. Art can be made to inspire thought.
3. Art can be made to present a network of related symbols.
4. Art can be made for self-expression.
5. Art can be made to be an effective optical illusion.
6. Art can be made to explore or illuminate the medium being used.
7. Art can be made to be beautiful.
The creation of beautiful things is a profoundly admirable purpose toward which artists sometimes strive. Don't hear me saying that it isn't admirable, or that it's less important than the other purposes I mention. Don't even hear me saying that you should like art made for other purposes as much as you like art that's made for beauty.
I do hope, however, that you've gotten a bit of a sense for the many positive ways in which you can interact with pieces of art that you might otherwise have dismissed. I also hope you've been persuaded that if you only accept art that is made for beauty, you'll miss out on lots of good stuff. If you only want to hear pretty things, you won't hear most of the things people say. If you only want to smell sugary things, you'll miss out on steak (!). If you insist on looking at beautiful art only, you'll cut yourself off from a whole swath of artistic thought and creativity. The steak and the sentences, if you will.
It's dangerous to throw virtues around (people feel bad disagreeing with someone who says, "We should be good,"), but I do think that the essence of this rant is a call to humility in respect to art. Rather than approaching a piece with adamantine assumptions about what sort of effect we will allow it to have on us, we should take the time to figure out what sort of effect it's meant to have, and allow it to affect us that way. Learn to interact with artworks as they are. Allow your ideas about art to fit the world, rather than rejecting the art world if it doesn't fit your ideas.