SUNDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER 2025

One of the questions that rattled around the art world and academia during the 20^th century was ‘What is Art?’ Things had seemed simple enough not all that many years before: Art was a picture on a canvas hanging in a gallery or in a rich person’s house, or perhaps paintings on the ceiling of a church; theatre was something that happened on a proscenium arch with the audience seated out front in an opulent, baroque building; music that was deemed worthy of the label of Art was an orchestra playing overtures and symphonies in a similar setting. But at some point the concept of Art grew in complexity and the answers to the question of how to define it became many and varied: everything is Art and there is no delimited area to which we can restrict it; calling something Art makes it Art as a result of a performative utterance; Art is a replacement for religion, helping us to explore our spirituality in an age where God is dead; Art is an expression of self-identity or sometimes a kind of personal therapy; Art is an expression of a culture or a social class or subculture; Art is a political tool to change society; Art is a cultural product in a consumerist world; Art is mere entertainment. Art has indeed become everything, it seems, but if everything is Art, then in a way nothing is Art, because the distinction between Art and Life evaporates and our attempts at definition slip through the cracks.

I have been using the capital letter A when I speak of Art, to differentiate it as a global concept from specific forms such as literature, music and painting (the latter in particular can cause confusion, with lower-case ‘art’ being used indiscriminately to mean both the broader aesthetic concept and the physical activity of painting and sculpting). This idea of Art as an umbrella under which the specific art-forms reside is relatively modern, with the Romantics and the giants of German philosophy playing a major role in its creation, and then later given further traction by the Aesthetes and art-for-art’s-sake at the end of the 19^th century. Art with a capital A acquired a lofty reputation, but not all art-forms were seen, or are seen, as equal: some of those which now enjoy a very high status, notably painting, were once viewed as clearly inferior to literature; for example, in ancient Greece, painters were ranked alongside carpenters as craftsmen, and had little of the cachet of poets and dramatists and architects. Interestingly, the same was largely true throughout most of Chinese history up to the end of the Ch’ing dynasty in 1912, where poetry (and calligraphy) were assumed to be the highest art-forms by the literati of the ruling class.   

Our first question, therefore, must be whether Art with a capital A even exists, or whether it is just a catch-all notion which emerged as a post-Enlightenment concept to differentiate a set of practices from those of an ever more self-confident and influential Science, a concept lumping together specific activities such as painting, writing and music in order to protect them from the onslaught of radical rationality. Is there an aesthetic realm where we somehow step outside of everyday reality and which we can clearly separate from ordinary life: can Art offer Kantian transcendence? Opinions differ among those who study or work in the arts, but nowadays the feeling among many is that Art is not real in the sense that a mountain is real, but that a painting or a poem based on that mountain can be somehow more real, since we have entered a different, deeper level of subjective reality, the mysterious realm of ‘Art’. Certainly there seems to be a sense not restricted solely to artists that Art can be our step into the wardrobe to enter Narnia.

But if we accept that this is possible, how do we decide which art-forms are allowed into this category and which are proscribed? The example of ancient Greek attitudes to painting shows that the status of individual forms can change substantially over time, and there are many modern examples of what used to be seen as lesser art-forms which have now been accepted into the domain of Art. For example, Grayson Perry won the Turner Prize in 2003 mainly for his ceramics, a category which would once have been excluded from what used to be called Fine Art (although the vases of antiquity behind glass cases in museums would probably have made the cut). In the early days of the Turner, painters were the main beneficiaries of the award, but the most common winning form since the turn of the century has been installation, an art-form which has only existed for a very short time, but already seems to offer more chance of preferment than traditional brushwork. So Art with a capital A is an unstable entity subject to radical change, as is also shown by the inclusion of photography and film once the intelligentsia caught up with popular taste.

Then there is the issue of quality. We perceive a difference, for instance, between a chair made by an unsung carpenter and a Chippendale that sells for a fortune at auction, or the functional, mass-produced furniture of Breuer at the Bauhaus. What makes the latter two ‘Art’ while that of the unsung carpenter is not? Is it the difference in quality, which in some way has lifted the Chippendale into a higher realm? In that case, are skill and technical ability the most important defining factors? Or, more cynically, does it merely come down to price: a piece of furniture is Art if it costs a load of dosh? Things get even more complicated when we move into other fields which are sometimes labelled Art – the cooking of Escoffier or the fashion of Quant or the hairdressing of Sassoon. Intuitively it feels wrong to place them in the same category as a sculpture by Michelangelo or an overture by Beethoven, but equally we feel the need for something to lift these examples above the meals prepared at McDonald’s or the haircut I get from my barber.

Mention of the Bauhaus brings us to another commonly held feeling: that there is a definitive difference between Art and Design. Once we attempt to identify this difference, however, it becomes more elusive. A common way of doing this is to separate Art as a source of deeper meaning from Art as mere decoration. The latter is dismissed as trivial, and relegating an art-work to decoration becomes a method of distinguishing between Art and non-Art, or at least inferior Art: for example, I have read claims that Islamic Art ranks below western Art because of its common (but by no means total) refusal to include representation of living things. Mondrian is another good example. He was very interested in the spiritual and definitely did not see his work as decorative: like many of the most important abstract artists of the 20^th century – Kandinsky, Klee, Rothko, the later Matisse – he saw his abstract work as reaching down into a deeper reality than the superficial mimesis of representational work. Yet his style became part of modern design in both furniture and home decoration: are his paintings somehow ‘Art’ while design based on them is not?

One key idea that underpins a lot of modern thinking about Art, even at the popular level, is the Schopenhauerian belief that artists have a duty to take the place of religion in a world which has lost its belief in the Christian God and is consequently threatened with nihilistic despair. This is active at both a philosophical level where Art is claimed to function as our only consolation in a world which is otherwise stripped of meaning or at a more populist level where it is seen as somehow good for us, a supplement we must add to our lives like exercise or Omega 3 fatty acid: Art as medicine. This role of Art as surrogate religion was important in many movements, such as late-19th-century Symbolism and Abstract Expressionism following the Second World War. In this view, true Art is quintessentially serious and meaningful in a way that goes far beyond surface decoration.

But can Art perform this role? For a few of us, perhaps, but even those among us who find solace in poetry or music must admit, as Schopenhauer did, that this respite from the indifference of the universe is temporary, and lasts only as long as the concert or our reading of the poem. It is a relief tinged with melancholy as we leave the realm of Art to open our eyes and see again the bars of our jail around us. Art is rarely a lasting consolation because the best Art is wedded to the truth just as firmly as Science is. So even if we believe that the comfort of Christianity was false, it offered so much more than Art can ever do, although many might call it fool’s gold: an eternity of bliss which would wipe out all the woes of this vale of tears.   

Another purpose which is often advanced as a key reason for Art in a post-Romantic age that focuses so heavily on the individual is that it serves as a mode of self-expression, a way of presenting our inmost soul to the world. This idea has grown in strength as generations of artists (Van Gogh, Munch, Soutine, Kahlo, most of the Abstract Expressionists) have been perceived, and sometimes perceived themselves, in this way. This focus on the internal and the spiritual would obviously rule out advertising from entering the realm of Art, and yet many famous artists have worked in this industry over the last hundred years. Are Warhol’s graphic designs for shoes and fashion, for example, different in some way from his work that is placed in galleries? Many would say yes, although I suspect that Warhol himself would have said no. Yet the same people who would deny graphic design entry to the temple of Fine Art are often ready to include the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec or Mucha in galleries and coffee-table books even though they are mass-produced objects created for the purpose of publicity.

Linked to the idea of Art as a form of self-expression is the notion of Art as therapy, encouraged by the influence of psychoanalysis. I’m not referring here to the work in therapeutic situations which uses painting or music or poetry as a way of helping people in mental distress to struggle against their unhappiness, but to the Romantic vision of the artist as a kind of shaman or holy fool working out his or her psychic conflicts through the practice of Art. Van Gogh is often viewed in this somewhat condescending manner, which ignores his profound interest in, and knowledge of, the practical theories of his field. Other significant artists, such as Dubuffet in painting and Artaud in the theatre, have sought authenticity in the art of children and the clinically insane. This idea has trickled into general consciousness, although at a less extreme level, especially in literature, where so much work in poetry is now focused on self-identity and represents a search for the authentic self, often centred around issues of gender, race or sexuality.

This brings us to the wider notion of Art as an expression of a culture, whether this be national or personal. Almost every country on the globe now has examples of Art which have become a kind of symbol of the nation: flamenco in parts of Spain, fado in Portugal, samba and bossa nova in Brazil, the Barong and Kecak dances in Bali, the cities frozen in time that are Venice and Bruges. These are often of little interest to the native population who live there, especially in developing countries, who take off their traditional costumes as soon as the tourists are gone and go back into their T-shirts and get out their mobile phones. (In the unlikely event that you don’t know The Far Side cartoon, ‘Anthropologists!’, I recommend you look it up.) On the level of the individual, this means people can sometimes feel trapped in their roles as members of a local minority, caught between the pressure to stay true to their upbringing and cultural roots and the desire to step beyond it into the wider world. If they are artists, they may feel a pressure or a need to express themselves through their art as an (oppressed) member of their minority, which offers them a gain in visibility but can come at the expense of imprisoning them in this role.

This brings us to Art as politics, both at the personal level and as a member of some kind of ‘tribe’. In the UK in which I grew up, the potential for Art to be interpreted as political tended to be erased in critical discourse, with its Arnoldian and Leavisite assumptions that Art belonged to a realm which lay far above the crudity of politics and was immune to its petty concerns. It is easy to exaggerate this, of course, and there are many historical exceptions to the view that the social and political meanings of Art only began to be explored in the 20^th century (much of the writing of Milton, the poetry of Shelley, the works of the French Romantics, the realism of Courbet, the naturalism of Zola, and so on ad infinitum). In the schools of my childhood, however, the canon stood firm and we were taught to view Shakespeare, for example, through factors like language and characterisation, not only when we studied works like Macbeth, Hamlet or King Lear, but also plays with obvious political content and implications such as Coriolanus or Julius Caesar.

I don’t see how anyone can deny that Art will always have a political edge, explicit or implicit. But this does not mean that Art is only political. Much of what is termed ‘critical theory’, especially that rooted in Marxism or, more recently, feminism, anti-racism, post-colonialism and queer theory, barely studies any work of art in and for itself as an aesthetic object, but views it purely as a manifestation of social and political import. This has trickled down to the masses and today even the general public will discuss the way a movie, for example, portrays gender or sexuality. While I broadly welcome this new awareness of the inevitable partiality of works of art, it can limit culture to one factor only rather than the larger environment from which an artist emerges: Art is a product of a whole culture, and cannot be separated from that culture, which is one of the reasons that I very much doubt that AI will ever be able to successfully produce it at the highest levels. For me, taking the aesthetics out of Art and reducing it solely to one overriding theory – be it political, social, philosophical or personal – leads to a narrowing of thinking that is antithetical to all that good Art aims to be.

Everything I’ve said so far has been very serious, but there is an argument that Art is essentially just entertainment, especially in a consumerist world where everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. Those who take this attitude will reject attempts to imbue Art with a quasi-spiritual nature as a surrogate for religion or an instrument of social change; they will dismiss what they see as unnecessarily fancy ideas and state that the main point of Art is to distract us from our labours and simply fill our empty time. Essentially it is Carnival, an opportunity to laugh and have fun, or even perhaps, from time to time, catharsis: a chance to enjoy the pleasurable release that tears can sometimes bring. People who take this view will usually be blind to the grim films of Bergman or the horrors of King Lear or the gloomy music of Nico. A movie is just a movie, not something grand called ‘Art’, and there is no purpose in struggling with ‘difficult’ poetry like that of Pound, or artworks in the gallery that need pages of exposition to teach us how to appreciate them, or atonal, twelve-tone music. Art should be a happy pill which leaves us lifted for a moment but has departed our mind completely by the time we go to bed.

I have to say I’m far from convinced by this idea, if only because personal experience has included many occasions when a work of art has left a deep and lasting impression on me, especially when I was young. And I’m not talking here about ‘serious’ stuff like Death in Venice or The Seventh Seal, but films which many would see as basically commercial, like Murder My Sweet or The Birds. In contemporary life, perhaps, where one impatiently clicks from link to link, this idea that works of art are basically interchangeable may have become more true, but I feel fairly sure that most people will have songs that have been an aural background for the whole of their lives or books that they read as a child which they will never forget. For some reason we can’t completely understand, Art matters to human beings to the point where we will create and enjoy it even in extremis.

Finally, many traditionalists insist that there must be a place for Beauty in Art, something that was absolutely central to so much ancient Greek thinking. The strongest advocates of Beauty would even argue that it is the most vital component of Art because it is only in finding and touching real Beauty that we can have an art that is truly transcendental, raising us beyond the messiness of everyday reality onto a higher plane: Pythagoras’ music of the spheres. The 20^th century has had a complicated relationship to Beauty, often seeing it as something fake, interpreting it as kitsch or self-delusion, and a lot of modern art-works seem to revel in ugliness instead because this seems more sincere and realistic. Yet Beauty remains something everyone seeks, responds to, and appears unable to do without, and music in particular can sometimes lift us above the everyday to a world of transcendental Beauty.

One thing that seems very clear as I write this blog is that Art is being asked to do a lot of heavy lifting in the modern world and take on a variety of roles. Our attitude to it in general is a contradictory mix of glorifying it as something special which we cannot survive without and reducing it to picking which superhero film to watch on Netflix tonight. With regard to the question of what Art is, my own bias is to be as inclusive as possible and not to exclude works that many would deride as trivial or shallow, but I soon reach a point where I baulk at this because I feel a need for standards, which may reflect my upbringing in a pre-postmodern and pre-computerised age. At the risk of being summarily despatched to Pseud’s Corner, I will finish my overview of how we might define Art by calling it a rejection of entropy: as long as there are people making and enjoying art-works, human beings have not yet been reduced to mere machines.