This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
What is art?
It’s a question that swings in and out of popular concern. I studied film for seven years in college, so I heard a lot of definitions. Every single one revealed much more about the person who came up with it.
As for myself, I decided pretty early on that while there are gradients of good and bad, authentic and phony, it’s all art. Because art is just creative effort. And we know what that is. We know what distinguishes it from, say, simple mechanical labor, or reproduction. Art is an artifact of the effort to create something that is, by some conceptual metric, new.
Which conceptual metric is up to the eye of the beholder. You don’t really get to choose for anyone but yourself.
Can you find art in nature?
It depends on whether you believe in God. I do, so from my perspective, it is.
Why God? Doesn’t that seem sort of narrowly theistic? Couldn’t someone who doesn’t believe in an intelligent creator see art in nature?
I’m going to take a rhetorical risk here and say no.
And the reason I say that is because the definition of art I’m proposing, broad as it is, still needs some sort of constraint, otherwise the word has no meaning at all.
And the constraint I’m proposing is conscious intent. Someone with the ability to intend, someone who is a self-determining agent, someone, in other words, with a soul, must make a choice.
That is the one and only qualifier. So when I say it’s all art, what I mean is that anytime anyone intends to make art, what they make is, by this definition, art.
Robots need not apply.
Nature, absent a self-determining, agentive creator, need not apply.
If you believe the Earth has a soul, that nature is somehow a conscious being, then sure, what she creates could be art. But since it’s hard to form any kind of consensus around that sort of thing, I prefer to stick with humans and what they make.
And what they make, if they mean it, is art.
Art is when you mean it