'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said...

I read this blog recently hq.deviantart.com/blog/4211737… and responded with the following comment.

"What is art" has become an unanswerable question, but what is being asked here is more to do with the validity of 'found objects' as art. Prior to the 20th century, art was not hard to define. Any 2 or 3 dimensional representation of a figure or a scene was art. The verb 'art' linguistically means "skill as a result of learning or practice", and 'art' as a noun means objects constructed by an artist. It could be argued that a wall of gum is a found object that an artist has deemed it to be art, it is therefore art because he/she says that it is. If you accept conceptual art as a valid artistic medium, then literally anything can be art if an artist presents it as art. Is that a good thing? That is not for me to say. Does it dilute the word 'art'? I think it does.

Over the last 100 years the term 'art' has been broadened so much as to make it practically meaningless. Words are our means of communication. If a word becomes so vague and subject to individual redefinition, it ends up becoming entirely pointless.

Finally, to answer the question "is a wall of gum art?", I would say that a photograph of a wall of gum is art, or a painting of a wall of gum, or even a recreation of a wall of gum. What (to my mind at least) is not art is the wall itself. In as much as a painting or photograph of sunflowers in a field is art, but the actual sunflowers themselves are not.

I often read the words 'anything can be art' here on dA. The more I see it, the more convinced I become that a word that means just 'anything' or "any meaning  you choose to give it" is essentially meaningless. Defining the meaningless is an oxymoron.


(Alice Through the Looking Glass - by Lewis Carroll)