What is Art?

Essay: An exploration and attempt to define Art

“Do you think human creativity matters? Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. They have a life to live, and they're not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg's poems, or anybody's poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, they lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don't love you anymore, and all of a sudden, you're desperate for making sense out of this life, and [wonder] Has anybody ever felt this bad before?"  … Or the inverse - something great.  You meet somebody and your heart explodes.  You love them so much you can't see straight...”Did anybody feel like this before?  What is happening to me?"  And that's when art's not a luxury, it's actually sustenance. We need it.”

  — Ethan Hawke

In the past, I've defined Art as the following:  

The ultimate physical expression of the insatiable human hunger to create.  Art enables humans to send inspiration and energy to one another across space and time. 

And I think this definition is close to defining Art.  By Art (with a capital ‘A’), I mean that which goes beyond mere decoration, propaganda or kitch — Art that transmits some kind of meaning.  

With that in mind, I realize now that, while the definition above points in the right direction, it isn’t complete.  What follows is my attempt to deeply understand and define what Art is all about.

True Art is an attempt to express what we experience when we delve into The Mystery – a place of Truth, divine flow, life, and death; a place we can all visit but cannot describe in words; a place where we find our True Self.  Art provides us each with our own  unique glimpse into this sacred mystery.   

Previously, I’ve used the terms "inspiration and energy" to attempt to convey what is “transmitted” through the artist, and, consequently, through the artwork itself. But, upon further reflection, I feel the term Resonance is more accurate.  

Inspiration and energy, of course, are part of resonance, but resonance has a deeper connotation of something that rings true.  An idea or object that resonates is “in tune” with the divine.  It vibrates with the truthful energy found in The Mystery.  So, it seems to me, what we are exchanging with one another through Art is that very Resonance.  

We cannot, of course, fully experience the deep truth of The Mystery, at least not in this lifetime, but we do resonate with its vibrations.  That's how we know and feel its Truth.  

Most artists have experienced the feeling that their creativity (at least sometimes) comes from someplace or someone outside of themselves.  

Throughout the ages we've talked about creativity flowing into artists through supernatural forces and beings:  from the force of genius, from muses, from daemons, from the shadow, from the Other, or from God.

When our own grandiose self-important ego disappears, as it does when we step into the divine state of Flow, these forces, whether they are truly outside of us or simply deep within our own psyche, act on our behalf and provide us with inspiration that Resonates.  

Then, through our proficiency with our craft, through our mastery, we attempt to capture and express those resonating ideas in a way that retains the experienced resonance within our works of Art.    Invariably, as a part of this process, the unique resonance of the artist also gets mixed into the artwork.

Art that Resonates, therefore, captures a bit of this both the vibration of The Mystery, but also, a bit of the vibration of the artist who created it. Each piece of art, therefore, transmits its “message” in a completely unique way. That uniqueness is part of the point of Art.

Moreover, art that resonates also does so within the viewer’s psyche.  So the full “message” contains the resonate truth of The Mystery, the resonate truth of the artist, and the resonate truth of the viewer.  There are such endless unique possibilities of exciting meaning in this mix!

Visual art resonates with the viewer across space, and, being a permanent artifact of resonance, can continue to transmit its resonance across space to humans of a far future time.  

How magical it has been to join in the delight of The Mystery with the minds of past masters!  To ponder the deep Truth with Michelangelo, Sorolla or Van Gogh!  To find kinship with Alexandre Dumas, Hermann Melville, Ray Bradbury, or even Homer!  To commune with a man who wrote thousands of years ago is magic, and my life is enriched thanks to their courage to become themselves.

Live music resonates with the listener across time, but cannot be captured in a permanent artifact fully.  It is more ethereal.  Of course, music can be recorded, or performed by a different individual, but those become slightly different works of Art with a different resonance of the performer mixed in. Think of the different resonances of the version of I Will Always Love You as performed by Whitney Houston versus by Dolly Parton.  

Both versions resonate with similar truths, but also resonate with the vibe of the performer and so are each delightfully unique.  Musical recordings do carry resonance, but they also lose something of the original, much in the same way prints never quite capture the resonance and vibrancy of the original painting.  All forms of reproductions diminish most art forms, though they don’t completely erase resonance. 

Writing is unique among the arts with unique challenges, but also unique advantages.  Writing doesn’t lose anything when “reproduced” whether electronically or physically.  It is not necessary for me to read from Bradbury’s original manuscripts.  In this way, writing is, perhaps, the most “pure” mind-to-mind “transmission.”  But all Art attempts to express The Mystery.  And the truth of the mystery transcends language, which is the very reason we turn to Art.  So writing is saddled with the rather large disadvantage of having to express something beyond language in the very language The Mystery transcends.  Writing also has the disadvantage that it requires a large commitment of time and energy on the part of the reader.  Visual art, in some ways, wins hands down in the speed of “transmission” to the viewer.  Because writers have to work with language, great writers work diligently  to create a flow and rhythm in their work in an attempt to coax the reader into a focused state where he forgets he is reading and enters flow.  Poetry and fiction work best in this respect.

Whatever the medium, the task of capturing this elusive resonance is kind of like trying to capture lightning in a bottle.  

“People think you can turn creativity on and off. But it's not like that. It just kind of comes out: A mash up of all these things you collect in your mind. You never know when it's gonna happen, but when it does, it's like magic. It's that simple and it's that hard.” – Gwen Stefani

True Art is not easy. 

In a way, the artist must (temporarily) die to himself to create it.  If you try to dictate the "message" of your art by the mental willpower of your ego, it will fall flat, or, perhaps, if you are masterful enough, it will be technically good, but will become propaganda to carry your message rather than the truth of The Mystery.  

The famous Obama poster, or the social realism of the USSR era would be examples of masterful work that is propaganda.  I recall one Chinese artist who trained at an extremely young age, during the time of the cultural revolution, told me that, for his first few years of study, he thought that the definition of art was simply glorious depictions of Chairman Mao!

But True Artists enter the Mystery and let it bring forth the Resonance that it wants to bring forth. 

The key to entering the Mystery is training your mind, both conscious and unconscious, to attune to the Resonance of The Mystery, while Mastery is training your body-mind to become a unique instrument of technical proficiency capable of adding harmony and counterpoint to that Resonance.  

In essence, the act of becoming an artist is training to be both the player and the instrument. Think of the pure “instrumentality” of a masterful dancer’s body.

The resulting “music,” when “in tune,” creates deep Beauty, it creates Symbols, and it creates Myth.

Deep resonant beauty is hard to define, but we know when it is depicted because we feel the resonance. We recognize worldly beauty, of course, such as a painting of an attractive woman. But The Mystery also brings forth a deeper kind of beauty which we also recognize.  An old man or woman with interesting character lines, smiling with laughter radiating from his or her eyes is also beautiful.  More so, in fact, in some deeper way that we can’t quite articulate. Beauty transmits some form of deep truth.  Only worldly beauty is “skin deep.”

Symbols¹, likewise, become physical representations of the abstract truths we can feel in our deep memory of The Mystery.  Symbols point the way.  Symbols represent our true inner freedom.  While our bodies saddle us with a limited existence, specifically, in the fact that we are fated to die. The realm of symbols allows us to grasp the godly heights of immortality, to play with infinites, and to create astounding tributes to the mystic wonder of creation. Symbols also point to the deep fears and obstacles that we must overcome to find our true self.  These darker symbols may give rise to art pointing to warnings, to horrors, to tragedies, and to death.  Some art encompasses symbolizes both the dark side and transcending it into the light.  These darker symbols remind us we must integrate our mortal side — our bodies that remind us that we have to accept the realities of this earthly life.  Navigating this conundrum is the difficult realm of the Artist (and the mystic, and, ultimately, all of us if we are to find our true self).

Myths are the sacred stories that contain deep and mythic truths.  In many ways, Artists tell part or all of the deep mono-myth inside of all of us over and over in infinitely interesting ways.  The mono-myth story  resonates because it is every human’s true inner journey - the journey to overcome the fear of death and come home into the true freedom of our true nature;  to finally integrate both our spiritual and our physical sides. 

Isn’t this quite literally what the myth — the sacred story — of Christ points toward? The divine immortal being fully and gracefully accepting the indignity of mortality and death and thus reconciling the physical and the spiritual? The mono-myth concept was popularized by Joseph Campbell in his book Hero of a Thousand Faces — a concept that famously inspired George Lucas in writing and improving the Star Wars story².

These elements of art (beauty, symbols, and myth)  are the primary elements that transfer Resonance to other humans, providing each perceiver with a glimpse into the inspiring and terrific Truth of The Mystery.   

Oscar Wilde famously said that, “All art is quite useless.”  And I think his quip points at something.   In the physical, profane world, his observation is true.  Saying “art is useless” is almost a definition of art, from the perspective of the physical, profane world.  For, if art had a “use,” that use would necessarily become the predominant property of the piece and the art “content” would be somehow demoted into a secondary property.  A lovingly crafted wine glass is still, primarily, for drinking wine.  I admit that this point is arguable and some rare functional objects might be so overwhelmingly artistic as to transcend their earthly use.  But most of the time, Wilde’s idea points us in the right direction.

True art might be “useless” in the earthly, physical realm (of our slowly decaying mortality), but Art is immeasurably valuable in the plane of non-form such as in our imaginations,  in the symbolic world of a man’s mind, in the infinite of our psyche, or in the ether where our spirit lives and imagines eternity.  Art helps us navigate the conundrum between the finite and the infinite.  

That’s what I think Ethan Hawke was getting at in the epigraph quote at the beginning of this chapter.  Art points us to deep truths, and thus, in our attempt to walk the center line between the symbolic world of heaven and the real, material world of earth — it points the way home to our true selves.

Of course, I understand that what I’m proposing is a sort of “pure” definition of art, and that what actually comes out from us, as messy human beings who don’t live purely inside The Mystery, may live somewhere on a “continuum of art” with True Art on one end, made from the soul and purely for oneself, to the opposite end where some aesthetic object is made only with selling it in mind. 

Thus, some art may be partially born of the mystery, some pieces may focus only on beauty, while others may focus more on myth. And our resulting work could fall anywhere on this continuum.  That’s part of being human and our job is to embrace our “messy imperfections” and see them for the gifts of uniqueness that they really are.  We can’t be gods and we can’t be animals.  We can’t be immortal, but we can’t quite accept mortality either.  We must uniquely walk in the middle.  It is what it is.

The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo

Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam depicts this unique struggle beautifully. Adam lounges, stuck on earth, limited by his mortal body of clay, while God, the symbolic spiritual world of immortality, reaches for him, God’s “cloud” providing double mythic symbolism as both the true divine, and the human brain itself where man can escape into his mind and the freedom of the symbolic to let his imagination and his awareness soar into the godly realm of immortality. God’s arm offers the in-spired breath of of “life” — the power of creation — notice Adam is already physically alive. God is offering him the promethean gift of inspiration — the creative power of the god realm. In other words, not just un-deadness, but true life. God is offering to make him an artist, a creator, “in his image.”  God’s forearm is significantly (and symbolically) reaching through the pre-frontal cortex — so important in humanity’s uniqueness, his arm intriguingly piercing the location of the ajna, the mystical “third eye” - a point believed to be the seat that receives in-spiration (representing the creative power of God “breathing into” this point) and intuition. 

God is offering Adam nothing less than a psycho-spiritual grasp of immortality…and maybe a glimpse of what humanity could eventually become. Adam, for his part, hasn’t yet accepted the gift, perhaps he is afraid to come home to his true self, as are most of us. He sits lounging, almost lazily, with his finger just almost touching God’s as if the gift isn’t worth the effort to literally lift a finger. (Is this where we get the phrase “he didn’t even lift a finger?”) What’s holding Adam back? Is he afraid? Or, does Adam not believe?  Without having yet received the gift, perhaps he is mired in the thoughts of his logical side, denying the spiritual just as much as modern man does, a condition that led Nietzsche to famously declare, “God is dead.”  Whatever it is that Adam struggles with, it’s universal.  This is the struggle we all face in the inner Artist’s “Hero’s Journey” to come home into our true and full selves.  Perhaps all we have to do is simply lift a finger.

So, my suggestion, when creating art, is to strive to stay more to the mystery side of the continuum, where the promethean soul fire of the divine burns, rather than working closer to the marketing side.  (As you’ll see, later in the book, we put on a different hat when we start marketing the art).  As I often quip: you must be in the market but not of the market. 

Or, as Naval Ravikant said, “if you make it for yourself its art, if you make it for the market it’s business.”

My corollary to his idea is that, in my experience, the farther you stay to The Mystery side of the spectrum, the easier selling the work becomes because of the fact that, if it resonates with you, it is more likely to resonate with most humans.

So, what is Art?  

Let’s take another stab at defining it:

Art is the ultimate physical expression of the human desire to enter and understand The Mystery, a desire that leaves an insatiable hunger to create within each of us.  Entering the Mystery and expressing it is the only thing that will temporarily satisfy this hunger.  Art enables (and is the only channel that enables) humans to send our expressions of Resonance across space and time, to provide inspiration and energy (in the forms of beauty, symbols, and myth) to one another.  Upon receiving these expressions of resonance, we interpret them as deep truth through our own unique experiences of reality, allowing us to also, even if only in our own minds, express the Mystery in our own way, and thus participate in the beautiful and terrifying ongoing symphony of transformation of the Cosmos.

What is your definition of Art?

Sum ergo creo,

Clintavo

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Footnotes:

1. I originally called “symbols”, “tokens.”  Then I read Reclaiming Art in the age of Artifice by J.F. Martel and he used the term “symbols” and I feel it better captures the idea, so I have appropriated it.  I highly recommend his book, by the way.

2. At the risk of sticking my foot in my mouth, I  think Joseph Campbell has a few unnecessary steps (though optionally they can be included) in The Hero’s Journey.  

For one thing, we each have an internal hero’s journey and although they rhyme greatly, they aren’t always identical.  Also, it’s obvious in reading Hero of a Thousand Faces that he was heavily influenced by Freud’s idea that sexual repression the primary source of neurosis (Chapters “Meeting with the Goddess” and “Atonement with the Father”).  Nearly one hundred years later it’s obvious that Freud missed on that one.  The primary source of “neurosis” (as he called it) isn’t sexual repression.  It’s the universal need of man to repress the fact that he is saddled with an animalistic body that limits his freedom and he is going to die.  

This is no slight of Campbell’s incredible work.  The very fact that The Mystery transcends language means we all interpret it uniquely and his Hero’s Journey idea does resonate.  I simply don’t think all the steps in the journey are strictly necessary.  Even in Star Wars, Luke doesn’t face a “Meeting with the Goddess” step (though some try to shoehorn his time with Yoda into that part of the journey), in contrast, in Lord of the Rings - Frodo’s time with Galadriel is definitely his Meeting with the Goddess.