Ideas & Art

After working on the article for, checks notes, 0 hours, I have decided to make intermediary articles in the meantime.

What is art?

Art is a weird thing. What even is art? This question has been aching at me for some time. Usually, this means everything. I do not like this definition. Art can, literally, be anything, from the laptop I'm writing this on to the program I'm writing on to drawings and blender and everything is. I feel, however, what separates art from just regular pieces of work are the two aspects of scrutiny and intent. I wanna use this article to do that—to define it.

The idea of art, if we were to define it, is having a medium, whether visual or as text, that conveys a specific idea, even if it requires thinking.

Intent and Meaning

Intent is the easier to define. It is just saying that art, in itself, has to mean something, has to try and convey something to the purveyor of the art. However, it is also one of the hardest things to understand and learn when starting an art form. Most people care more about how the piece of art looks than what it actually does in the heart and mind of a person.

Anyone can write poetry; it is simply writing a rhythm in a short amount of words per line; sometimes it does not even have to rhyme. What makes some poetry genuine is the intent of it, not just writing rosy prose, but inciting emotion in the reader. Stories, poetry, sculptures, visual arts are supposed to convey something, to give meaning, to illustrate purpose. I think my website kinda tries to do that, cause my aim for the website is to show both a website can be cool and minimalistic. To show that the modern web and the indie work are not two distinct things.

A story has to do the same. I read my old work and while I naturally cringe, I think about how I was just writing rosy prose for the sake of it, not really because I want to put my ideas into the world. Maybe it was because I was scared of meaning, I could not think about putting meaning into text. That is what makes art different. The means do not matter; only the ends. People make shock art to unsettle people, not because it is beautiful or people can double tap it on a screen, but because they want to convey something, speak their truth into the world.

That is why the Nigerian military government prosecuted Soyinka, the Communists repressed artists, why Nazis presented good looking art as dissenting. They do not care what the art is about, but care that the art is making people think. This is why, in my opinion, profit-oriented and art made by Artificial Intelligence is so easy to tell, and why it is of low value and considered "slop". Art made for profit has the meaning of wanting to sell something to someone, and has to change tact to do this. It cannot rely on the gravity of the words; it wants to have as broad a market as possible. Art for profit cares less if the Art is worthy enough and focuses on it being palatable enough.

AI art suffers from the same problem. An AI model creates art to reach a goal, not to have an intent of what it wants to make. A generator wants to have a specific motive, it must be able to discern what sectors of training data to use and what that data can be used to help it create something unique. It cannot inherently know what training data is good for a specific motive, or what training data is bad on purpose to fulfil that motive. Shock art would not be used by AI and is somewhat unsettling for humans, but it carries more artistry than most other things. You cannot have intent if the art is a pure amalgamation of different art, and not something you make yourself.

The Element of Scrutiny

The second part of this is scrutiny. But cannot all art be scrutinised? Scrutiny and objectifying art, I think, should be two different things. While art can be objectified, it cannot necessarily be scrutinised. Scrutiny relies on the art being able to be thought and talked about in good faith, having nuance in the discussion, and it is that good faith that separates genuine scrutiny from something like hate-watching, which is not in the spirit of artistry at all.

Scrutiny itself does not have to be a grand gesture. It only requires one person to see and express an opinion, even if not heard, for it to be scrutiny. This can be a random person on the street, or on the internet, or a friend talking about art you made, or a comment on a post. The only thing the element of scrutiny demands is that the work itself is open to that engagement, that it does not wall itself off from being thought about. A bad artist who despises all feedback can still make a work that invites genuine scrutiny. The work and the artist are not the same thing.

Furthermore, this can be subdivided into whether it can be scrutinised by looking on the platform it is hosted and the substance of the art piece. Part of it is the platform where that art is hosted. If it is hosted on a place where you cannot post comments or talk about it and prohibits talking about the art anywhere else, it cannot be scrutinised and therefore cannot be art. You can internally objectify a piece of work, but if one is unable to externally scrutinise it, it fails to be art. It is hard to scrutinise a stereotypical drawing because all scrutiny will always centre on the bigotry. Art cannot be scrutinised if it is on a platform that only allows a specific type of comment; it attempts to be art, but with the safeguards upon it, it fails to be art.

Art made by artificial intelligence, due to that, cannot be scrutinised. You can give an artwork training data from critiques from previous artworks, but it will then focus to make that specific type of artwork to be better, not to help it get better at art in general. One cannot externally critique AI art because we do not know the process of that art being made, what caused a specific thing to be at a specific place, other than just guessing that it was the most common in the dataset.

Measuring Art's Value

Using all this, art can be defined as any piece of work that has intention and can be scrutinised. The level of intention and scrutiny it has, therefore, can show its level of value. It can be monetary value, but it can also be intrinsic value. Pokémon cards can have a high value because of their intent of being rare and their scrutiny of said rarity. High value art can be achieved when the intent and scrutiny of the art piece align.

Things Fall Apart, perennial prose taught at every African school, was able to have the intent of African tradition and its cold reality in that world be the subject of its scrutiny. Let's take Antony and Cleopatra for example. The intent of that play was to show the ills of romance, even at the highest levels, and he works accordingly. The intent of the play is used to represent the actions in the play to the largely illiterate English audience of the time, explaining things as they go. This allows them to be scrutinised, even after his time. The way he had to adapt and created imagery of love in distraught can still be scrutinised to this day, creating High Value Art. The Mona Lisa has a high value because of the intent to show the limits of art and realism and is scrutinised by using that objective.

Conversely, games such as Overwatch 2 are universally hated cause they did not meet the expectation of its audience; the intent of the developers was not the scrutiny it received.

Substance and the Practice of Craft

We have talked about Art in the abstract here, when the content is also very important. Does the content of art matter as much as the meaning of the art? In both types of art, I think it matters, but not as much as meaning of it. There has always been discourse about things that seemingly have no substantive portion costing hundreds and thousands of dollars. While most of that type of art sold is based on speculative value and not actual merit, they still have an essence of substance in it.

Something may have the most important meaning and can be critiqued, but if it was written by a person who has never read a book in their life, it may cease to be critiqued faithfully and lose its intent, reducing its artistic value. Prose can mean something, but if it looks like it was written by a person who has never written in their life, no one will care. Art, therefore, is made out of two parts: meaning and objectivity.

The content of art is something that has to be trained to be good at. I think I, still, am bad at writing. When I look at my old pieces of work, I cringe a lot. That shows that I am getting better, and conversely have something to improve on. With that writing, one can feel more emotions, have that capacity to see issues better. Art is a universal thing.

Art is not supposed to be treated with a definition. Rules are meant to be broken. Cows grow on trees, and other commonly known quotes. This is not supposed to be used as reference to be used to check against other art. It is just a crystallisation of various thoughts I had, put to page to give an opinion. I love art, neocities is one of the highest levels of art in the world. Let this not be a justification to not make art, for art only truly survives if people make more of it.