what art is

He had taken a day off to hang out in San Francisco exploring art galleries. It was the first time he had done this in a very long time. He had carpooled with a friend who was attending a work-related class near a major concentration of galleries and they had parked and left his Honda in a garage for the day. He was on foot and armed only with a list of addresses and a pair of sensible shoes.

The day had gone well, and he had seen more than a dozen galleries crossing the spectrum from 19th century landscapes to avant guard installations and videotaped performance art. Some of what he had seen had moved him deeply, some had not.

He was intrigued by the ways he was and was not moved by the works he saw in the galleries that day. What exactly was it that empowered a work of art? Why did some pieces work better than others? He knew the answers to these questions were fraught with hazards, both for the art and for the viewer, and certainly for the one who dared venture an answer. But answer, he must, since these were among the most significant questions involved in his creative emergence.

He knew enough of the structure and politics and sophistication of art criticism to know that the historical value of a work of art is a different thing from the intrinsic quality and worthiness of the same work. The historical value of a piece has to do with its place or lack of place in the evolution of art. Did it break new ground? Did it influence the work of the artist’s peers and those that followed? How persistent or powerful was that influence? These questions are questions of history. The answers are significant to artists and students of art, but they are very different from the questions that guide the evaluation of intrinsic quality and worthiness.

The intrinsic quality of a piece of art involves technical competence and sophistication, and emotive force and complexity. These attributes are somewhat independent of the questions regarding the place of the piece in history. Artists tend to fall into two camps: those who concern themselves primarily with the intrinsic integrity of their work, and those who are as much or more concerned with their potential place in history.

He had always held the intrinsic integrity of his work as his primary ideal, but in his earlier years, he had been quite concerned with the historical questions as well. Time had gradually tempered his interest in his place in history. He had seen too many artists compromise the intrinsic integrity of their work, throwing themselves and their work into a creative blind alley in hopes of breaking new ground. Much of what left him uninspired in the galleries that day seemed to be just such striving after a footnote in the history books.

As the years had passed, he had forged a greater urgency to make his work count; to ensure that what he did was true to his own calling. He had lost patience with the historical debate. He knew it was important, and he respected it, and would keep abreast of it, but could not allow it to distract him or drain energy away from his mission. He must leave the debate to others. He would focus entirely on the integrity of his own work. He would draw upon the work of those who moved him, and avoid the rapidly diminishing temptation to deviate from his calling to break new ground. He suspected that if ground were to be broken, this would be the most natural, powerful, effective way to do so. And if new ground proved not to be broken, so be it.

The driving urgency of his work—his calling—was to capture the essence of the human heart; to call up depths of emotive force and energy that usually lie dormant and under-expressed; to invite the viewer to explore his or her own soul. He would sacrifice any hope of a place in art history to pursue this calling if need be. It was far more important than any recognition his ego could receive. And he found himself drawn to just such works as he roamed the galleries. Some of what inspired and moved him was harsh and dissonant; some was beautiful; some simple and elegant; some abstract; some complex; some confusing. Various artists had drawn on diverse emotive tools to work their magic. To varying degrees, some had failed to move him, but he would not lay responsibility for that entirely at their feet. After all, he as viewer was also responsible for the art he experienced.