What is Art?

Everyone has an opinion and art truly represents the culmination of one’s personal idea or opinion. Many of us have pondered the question, what is art? It is a difficult question to answer and I think one that deserves a fair amount of focus to unravel. Everything that humans understand is categorized and listed so that we can easily communicate ideas. We’ll use the same approach here. Art falls into two categories. Art that requires explanation and that which doesn’t.

“Art that doesn’t require explanation” is universally accepted as beautiful by most viewers which makes it difficult to achieve interesting and most importantly new ideas in this category. “Art that doesn’t require explanation” also contains natural beauty. The source of beauty for all living things is nature.

The second category is “art that requires explanation” to reveal its hidden beauty. This doesn’t mean that beautiful art wont also have an interesting story to go with it or maybe an unusual method of production. However, its beauty would stand alone without any explanation needed.

Its not an easy task to use traditional beauty and create something new and amazing because so much has already been done. It requires lots of skill development to produce art that contains natural beauty because the artist must start from the basic ability of mimicking reality in their work before progressing to more complex ideas.

This leads us to our main topic, what is art? In order to really understand we must break it down to its simplest terms. Art is an “idea” and nobody can discredit that idea as being art. All art starts from an idea and an Artist defining their idea as art makes it 100% art.

The best art takes the most time and effort to achieve. The worst art takes the least time and effort to achieve. Things that require skill and practice to achieve are universally beautiful because they are at the core of nature’s ability to exist. Some creatures grasp concepts easier than others or have the benefit of slight physical advantages that culminate in a major advantage for skill development in the long run. However, practice will make any person better at a particular skill and give them the possibility of being the absolute best of themselves at that particular activity.