What is Art?

This is a common question the first week of an Art class. According to Dictionary.com, art is the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. This definition is ambiguous. According to this definition, one must define what is beautiful and appealing to define art. This definition assumes that what is beautiful and appealing is a universal concept.

Understanding that beautiful and appealing are subjective, one looks deeper into this definition. It states that art is the quality, production, expression, or realm; therefore it implies that art is created, and created according to aesthetic principles. What are these principles? They are the elements and principles of art. That is a topic we can explore another day.

Taking the idea that are is created, one must jump to the conclusion that both mental and physical effort is put forth to create art. Whether one likes the art is a subjective matter, but whether something is art should be clear.

That was not the case in the 1920's when the Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi's The Bird was being brought into the United States. At the time, there was no tariff on artistic imports. When The Bird was being unloaded from the ship, the port authority charged a tariff on the sculpture, saying it was merely scrap metal.

To learn more about the legal proceedings that determined whether Brancusi's sculpture was art or scrap metal, listen to he artist on BBC Radio.

The image that appears here is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. This marble Bird in Space is the first of a series of 17 which included 7 marble and 9 bronze views of Bird in Space.