What is art?

I couldn't sleep last night. For two hours of tossing and turning my brain buzzed with this problem of what art is. Having spent all day spinning the latest piece of Caveman into prose from my lecture notes, I realized I had barely touched the subject. Art means too many things, I think, to attempt nailing it down definitively in Caveman, which has a different thrust, but this blog is extracurricular, so why not?

Art connects human beings at conscious and subconscious levels. Art stimulates the mind and the emotions. When the artist connects to the viewer of the art, there ensues an ennobling of the human spirit from which both gain. Art tells me something about myself of which I was previously unaware, or demonstrates a sublimity of which I was previously unaware, or a connection of which I was previously unaware. Art makes me more aware. Art betters me as a person. Art allows the artist to touch the communal soul of humanity, and to expland that soul.

Yadda yadda yadda.

None of these are definitions, they are descriptives. They're all fairly inchoate, in a blather meets dither sort of fashion. Like everyone who gets stuck explaining things nowadays does, I will fall back on Potter Stewart's approach to obscenity and simply point out that I'll know art when I see it.

I do think that the descriptives above connect to the Aristotelian explanation of the value of art, and I do believe that many of the greatest artistic achievements of humanity, measured by these criteria, were created in the 19th Century. When an artist touches the infinite, our discovery of that touch allows us to share in the touching. We are awed. We stop dead in our tracks. We can't speak. We won't speak. We can even be brought to tears.

I don't think the ancients do that. They do not take our breath away. The Sistine Chapel does it, and maybe Michelangelo is the first great Individualist. Or maybe he's one of the first to struggle with touching the infinite in ways that still affect us in 2005.

I was thinking primarily of music when I was tossing around last night. Especially Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. In keeping with my descriptives, the 9th definitely does the job, and few would dispute it. I guess if you could articulate what happens inside you when this piece of music ends, you would be able to define art to me.

I do have a couple of book moments too. The 19th Century was a great time for writers and writing. The novel became The Novel, with folks like Dickens attempting to sum up the world around them and perhaps even change it. Dickens was a great reporter as well as a great stylist. He certainly set himself the mission of documenting societal ills. Aside from Esther's discovery of her stone cold dead mother in Bleak House, however, few moments stand out as frisson-making for me in CD, and even the BH moment is one of purely good narration rather than touching the infinite. Dickens, btw, is one of my favorite writers, whom I've plowed through in some cases a couple of times, in other cases more than a couple of times. Dickens as he is taught ("Let's start the kiddies / With Tale of Two Cities") is probably the best way imaginable to ruin any nascent interest a kid may have in the greatest story-teller of the 19th Century. Tale is the least Dickens of all Dickens's books. Jeesh.

One moment I think that does touch the infinite in 19th Century literature is the moment Huck decides he will go to hell rather than ratting out Jim. That will take your breath away and ennoble your soul as much as it ennobled Huck's. And Twain's. Another moment is when Ahab calls out that secret boat crew of his to swear their allegiance to killing the whale. Your eyes pop reading this scene that approaches the very edge of human existence. That both of these are American moments may be entwined with the native individualism of America, which was always at the leading edge of living the life of the Individual. We were pioneers braving the unknown from the getgo. Nietzsche or Sartre may have cogitated about the individual qua individual, but Clemens created himself wholecloth from a journeyman's ramble through a premythical American West, while Melville really was Ishmael, signing himself up as a whaler. I can't imagine Sartre on a whaling ship. Or roughing it. Hell is other people? For Sartre, hell is not enough Galouises and Pernod when he's bloviating at the local bistro.

It's always the French, isn't it?

Anyhow, keep in mind that the second half of the name of this blog is Ramblings, which is what this post is. I admit that I can't define art, and I refuse to paste some definition out of Webster's. I agree to a point that art is what artists say it is, but mostly I'll stick with Potty and say that art is what I say it is.