What is art? Such a hard question to answer… 

Nowadays the common census seems to be  that  art is everything, personally I have a lot of trouble finding art in a can of beans or in a canvas sprayed with toothpaste. I think that if we want to find, or discover as it is, what is art, I think we should start by thinking about what is considered the best art and why.

What is the difference between Pollok and Boticelli? or Mozart and Britney Spears? Obviously Britney Spears isn’t remotely the artist Mozart was, is she even an artist? Many people say that the reason art has become such a mundane thing is because of commercialization; the arts are made to be sold, music and paintings and even sculptures. I don’t know if that is the whole problem, it may be a part of it, what I am sure of, is that Britney Spears is considered an artist and she doesn’t even know anything about music, is like a painter that doesn’t know how to paint, yet, why is she considered an artist? well, she sings and dances, and a lot of people  imitate her and buy her music and want to be like her, and that’s the thing, if I wanted to imitate Mozart I wouldn’t be able to, yet I can sing a pop song with autotune without a problem (and even without it), so if Britney Spears is truly an artist then everyone is an artist, and in consequence art doesn’t exist or in the best case it would be like drinking water or walking.

“What belongs to everybody, belongs to nobody”

                                          —–Anonimous Mexican proverb

Yet I don’t believe that is how it works, how can art be common? Or how can it be created by a simple commoner? Who can stare at Monet’s Woman with a parasol and not gasps in awe, art is the contrary of common, art is extraordinary, extraordinarily beautiful or extraordinarily strong often  made by extraordinary people with extraordinary skills; and so for the first part in our definition, we may have “Art is anything made with extraordinary skill”

There are many things that can be made with extraordinary skill, like a shoe or a gun, and I suppose that it could be art for the right person, a gun connoisseur may consider a extremely valuable and rare revolver as a piece of art, and it could be, but then, beating Halo on legendary difficulty would be art for some people, and a room full of people starving to death could be art for a serial killer, so what’s the difference between a shoe and the Wedding of Figaro?

Art, I think, has to be good in it’s essence, striving for the maximum beauty, coherence and/or complexity, and I think whatever is art has to try to follow the canons made to describe the perfect-ness in a piece of art, for example, what would Mozart describe as the perfect or the best piece? 

 Art has to be good in itself, has to have a purpose, beauty is a very curious thing, it may not be so obvious,  there can be beauty in a powerful image, sometime even when there is a dark theme; that’s why art has to have a purpose, to inspire terror or to make you cry, or jump or just make you feel something, and I think that true art hast to accomplish this purpose , and in a way, that’s what the extraordinary skill is needed for.

In conclusion, putting together the difference ideas commented abvove,  we can say that art is “Anything made with extraordinary skill that strives to achieve maximum beauty, coherence and/or complexity that has a predefined purpose/intention and achieves it”