What is Art?

What is Art? This is a question that has been asked constantly and repeatedly in my lifetime, and certainly much longer than that. The real question should be, "Do you care what art is?" How many of us really take time to make sure we have art in our lives?

I homeschool my 9 and 10 year old sons. My last two semesters in college I was taking Art Therapy courses with a summer internship in AT as well. As students we were required to keep our own art journals. We also made small art directives in each class period. That really gave me an opportunity to slowly break back into "art" after being out of school for 30 years. As I do with most of the homework I bring back from my classes, I engage my boys. They were happy to join me in all of the creative tasks I was able to share with them. I think some of what they created is great art, and not just because I am their mom. It is spontaneous, unrestrained, and very fresh. I yearn for some of those qualities in my own art.

As a class we collectively could not name any artists from the last few decades. We know who comes to our local art center. We know the artists we study in our classes. We know the artists that are displayed when we travel to other art museums. I still cannot come up with names of any contemporary artists. The most recent name I can come up with would be Jim Dine, and you want to know why? He was the headliner on one of the trips that I took as a senior art student to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. I went to the Richard Gray Gallery's website that was showing Dine and was very happy to see that he still paints robes, hearts, and tools - and I think he has greatly improved over the years!

I have been to many shows over the many years since then, but I couldn't tell you one of them. Have I lost my critical eye over the years? Probably. I looked at the Walker's website, just to take a peek and see if, perchance, there was an artist there whose name I might recognize. Nope. I did notice something I would like to add to the conversation, though. It was the titles of the shows that caught my eye - Baby Marx; Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera; Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependancy. 

That last title was a little different in that the artist's name was mentioned in the text scrolling across the top of the website. Is that what art has turned into? We don't have any "famous artists", so we need to come up with interesting titles? I think we have resorted to using the flashy headline grabbers to get people to come see the art in the museums.

So I went to the Art Institute of Chicago's website and looked at their current exhibition titles. Out of 15 shows, only five of them listed the artist's names in the header. About half of the titles did grab my attention: Belligerent Encounters: Graphic Chronicles of War and Revolution; Neither Man Nor Beast: Animal Images on Ancient Coins; and my personal favorite - Avant-Garde in Everyday Life (since we also discussed the meaning of avant-garde in class). Now can't you see some of these titles splashed across the top of the National Enquirer? Maybe a tabloid with a less colorful reputation, but you certainly can imagine one or two of these in newspaper headlines in the Sunday section of your local paper somewhere.

When it is tough for a senior seminar art class to come up with artists names culled from the last two or three decades, either nobody is making art or, or everybody thinks that the things artists are making is just not memorable art. What is art? I'm not entirely certain, but if we have no famous artists, does that mean there is no art anymore? That would take me back to the earlier post - is it the end of art?