What is Art?

by Andreas Herteux

What is art? An attractive painting? A good song? How about a movie or a dance expression? Or the salient act? With the noticed action of any kind? Are poems and aphorisms art? A sculpture or a sculpture? A smile or a clumsy cough? Or are they all just by-products of civilization, perhaps just somehow culture?

Well, to keep it simple; civilization is the establishment of the familiar. Culture is the identification with the familiar and art is the individual interpretation of the familiar. Already for this banal reason it seems to be impossible to answer the incoming question, because in the end it is only the own perception which raises a sequence of letters or does not concede any meaning.

From this point of view, everything that generally enjoys artistic rank or not should be considered. It is completely irrelevant whether it is a poem, a sculpture, a building or even a creation from the individual components of today’s lunch. Everything can be interpreted, if it produces a resonance in the human being and the individual is not afraid of its recognition.

The profundity of the question is therefore not found in the desire to explain the concept, but in the illumination of the familiar. This is mother and father, Athena and Dionysus, one includes Apollo, at the same time and who is able to educate it, that forms the basis for every artistic interpretation. The norm, the deviation, the old and the new. No interior remains untouched by the usual. No classical man has ever succeeded in withdrawing himself from every sensory influence from birth. No attempt at total escape from the world can escape the familiar, for the latter has the peculiarity of murdering and assassinating the new and exciting again and again. Sometimes quickly, occasionally slowly, and yet the end is certain.  What therefore remains for the artist? Only the attempt to shape the familiar itself? Or simply to rely on the very instinct of individual interpretation?

Does it even matter? Does it matter? And is what the reader is currently perceiving, or will perceive only a few minutes later, art? Who is able to say, because art, as we already know, is only the individual interpretation of the familiar. No more, but also no less.