What is “art”? The term has no simple or intuitive meaning. Most people understand the word in completely different, contradictory ways. Yet, at the same time, it is a profoundly important entity that surrounds us on all sides.
Let’s try to figure it out. First, let’s look up the meaning of this word in the most popular source of information—Wikipedia: ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ИСКРство
Art (from “arts to create”) is the process or result of expressing the inner world in an (artistic) image, a creative combination of elements in a way that reflects feelings or emotions.
For a long time, art was considered a form of cultural activity that satisfied a person’s love of beauty. With the evolution of social aesthetic norms and values, any activity aimed at creating expressive forms in accordance with aesthetic ideals came to be called art.
On the scale of society as a whole, art is a special way of understanding and reflecting reality, one of the forms of social consciousness and part of the spiritual culture of both man and all of humanity, a diverse result of the creative activity of all generations.
The concept of art is extremely broad – it can manifest itself as an extremely developed skill in a particular area.
You’ll agree, it’s quite difficult to understand. It’s as if the meaning was deliberately encrypted and hidden from the uninitiated. Now let’s try to explain this term in a more human-readable way: more simply and concisely.
Art is an instrument of culture
A key word pops up in the description, but it’s drowned in a mass of nonsense. This important word is “culture.” Art is the primary instrument of culture. It’s through culture that the term “art” is most easily understood.
Culture is what distinguishes humans from animals; it represents all the accumulated information humanity has accumulated, passed down from generation to generation. Animals are constantly evolving, passing on changes to their descendants through their genes. Humanity, in addition to genetic development, utilizes informational development. People are born and die, but the information they record remains forever in culture, constantly accessible to new generations. Art is the specific intellectual or physical objects through which culture is transmitted.
Culture shouldn’t be understood solely as something lyrical, opposed to the scientific and technical. Official science is just one branch of culture. In science, information about the outside world is carefully dissected, sorted, organized, and transformed into formulas. Culture, however, contains not only formulas but also poorly structured information that has not yet lent itself to scientific analysis. People have already grasped this information but haven’t yet fully comprehended it, so they use numerous examples, situations, actions, and similar images to describe it, rather than precise words.
Does this remind you of anything? This poorly structured information is what art is based on.
Art is the transmission of unstructured information.
Filtering Art
Does this terse scientific formulation bother you? No wonder. For most people, the word “art” is clearly associated with words like “beauty,” “creativity,” “skill,” “masterpiece,” but not with the term “unstructured information.” All of this can be explained in a little more detail by examining the process of creating works of art.
Contemporary artists sometimes create works of terrible quality and content, yet they are nonetheless considered art. True connoisseurs find these facts hard to reconcile. Art historians have even coined the special categories of “contemporary art” and “high art” to distinguish one from the other. The good, the kind, and the eternal should not be placed in the same category as the bad, the evil, and the fleeting.
But both are art. And don’t think that “modern” only refers to what emerged in the 21st century. Obscene paintings, books, and statues have been sold in markets since time immemorial. Perhaps even in the Stone Age, there were cave paintings of this kind. However, all these creations, aimed at satisfying current needs, have not survived to this day. When the foam of modernity settles, all that is temporary evaporates, leaving only the dried residue of the finest masterpieces.
This is how art works: creators create works of diverse styles, genres, and quality, but only the best examples—masterpieces—find their place in the cultural treasury. Masters of their craft are initially focused on this outcome—leaving a mark on culture—and so they explore timeless themes in their works that will be relevant to both contemporaries and posterity. In people’s memories, unpleasant and insignificant events are quickly forgotten, for purely psychophysiological reasons; only pleasant or vivid memories are long-lasting, providing emotional strength with each recollection. This is why all classic works seem so wonderful to us, and for the same reason we associate the words “art” and “beautiful.” Culture’s input filters are designed so that only that which aligns with universal human values and contributes to the further development of humanity enters.
From this point of view, the entire debate among art historians boils down to which part of art should be considered art: the entire diversity of unstructured information, or only that which has already passed through the filters of universal human values.
The pace of our lives accelerates every year. The time it takes to determine whether a work has become a classic has shrunk to literally 10-20 years. Separating the eternal from the fleeting is definitely necessary, but to do so, we must study both sides of art, not isolate ourselves from contemporary trends. After all, it is we, as a human community, who decide what posterity will watch and what will vanish into the abyss of time. With each passing year, more and more information emerges, and less and less time is given to sort it. Because of this, strange and absurd works are suddenly accorded the lofty title of classic. The structure and evaluation of art needs to be brought into order, so that more people can participate in this process, and so that cultural filters can perform their job as effectively as they did before the advent of the digital age.
Art is the ability to create beauty
Let’s consider that very “filtered art” that will ultimately remain in human memory. A more elegant and succinct formulation can be devised to describe it:
| The goal motivates the source. The source uses the means. The means achieves the goal. |
Art is the ability to create beauty. The source of art is creation (creativity).
The means of art is skill (craft).
The goal of art is beauty (spiritual pleasure).
Only three words were needed for the definition, but they contained the entire meaning: the source, the means, and the goal.
There are also three actions essential to art: comprehension (to motivate creativity), expression of thoughts and feelings (to utilize skill and mastery), and persuasion (to reach the connoisseurs). The first three components are the very essence of art; these other three components are not related to art, but are essential to it. Pure, disinterested art never places special emphasis on these actions. If, however, emphasis is placed on any element (comprehension, expression, persuasion), then art becomes a tool for some other action and ceases to be itself.
Emphasis on comprehension . The goal is to gain the author’s fame, or to publicize the event being described, to convey information (science, news, PR campaigns, advertising).
Emphasis on expression . The goal is to establish trust, necessary for persuasion (deception, exploiting human weaknesses).
Emphasis on persuasion . The goal is to impose one’s values, one’s point of view, to change worldviews (power, religion).
The figure shows a diagram of art in the form of a regular hexagon. One similarity emerges in this diagram as you move counterclockwise: comprehension, creation, expression, craft, persuasion, enjoyment. This resembles the cycle of any commodity: study, modeling, construction, production, distribution, consumption. The result is:
Art is a cycle of producing goods for the soul
A hexagon is a closed figure, with tension within it. Each face opposes its opposite face.
Expression is opposed to pleasure.
Pleasure is a need, a craving for beauty and spirituality. Expression is a possibility, something a person can do. Often, possibilities are insufficient to satisfy needs. To achieve new needs, one must change possibilities.
Craft is opposed to comprehension.
Production is focused on creating existing ideas, honing them to perfection, and investing a great deal of effort into the finished product. Therefore, the emergence of new knowledge is not beneficial to production: everything must be rebuilt to accommodate the new ideas, expending resources, and re-achieving the ideal. Changes in production never occur voluntarily, but only under pressure from external circumstances (for example, an actor’s successful role obscures all other roles, forcing them to play what they excel at). To grasp the new, one must detach oneself from the old.
Conviction is the opposite of creativity.
Persuasion is the means by which products are disseminated and consolidated. “Persuasion” is as rigid a structure as “craft.” It resists new creations, preventing them from reaching consumers. (Example: true fans of a computer game series always greet a new entry with hostility, no matter how good it is.) To create something new, one must become disillusioned with the old.
This internal tension forces the entire system to stand still almost forever. Only when one of the three elements of movement (pleasure, comprehension, creativity) becomes stronger than its opposite (the elements of inertia: conviction, craft, expression) does change occur in the entire cycle. Changes occur, and immediately the elements of inertia begin to ossify again, until the next change.
Art goods
Now let’s look at what kind of “goods for the soul” art produces.
All artistic products are sensations through which humans perceive the world around us, namely: smells, tastes, touch, colors, movements, sounds, and thoughts. In general, all our sensations of the world can be divided into two groups: the sensation of form and the sensation of movement. The sensation of color, which lies at the intersection of these two groups, provides us with the most complete information about the world.
As the diagram shows, movement and form are the two opposites that make up the entire world. Perhaps consciousness is a third, fully-fledged component of the world, in which case the diagram could again be represented as a regular hexagon, but this is not yet possible; there are not enough facts. Try it; perhaps you can prove this theory.
| The world as “form-movement.” Understanding the structure of the world through the senses. |
Let’s consider each sensation separately.
Smell is the analysis of the chemical composition of a form at a distance (using gas analysis (individual atoms emitted from the analyzed object)).
Taste is a direct analysis of the chemical composition of the form .
Touch is the sensation of encountering form . But form itself cannot be directly sensed.
Acceleration is the sensation of changing speed. If we’re moving at a uniform, constant speed, there’s simply nothing we can sense. The sensation of movement itself is inaccessible to consciousness.
Sound is the sensation of waves of air density emitted by the movement of a form. Sound itself is movement (a wave). The sense of hearing, perceiving sounds, analyzes the movements occurring around it.
Thought is a long-term analysis of movements . It represents assumptions about what movements may occur in the future. These assumptions are based on movements that have already occurred (experience). The more experience, the more complex and true the thoughts. It’s like a sense of smell, not for objects and their atoms, but for events and their consequences.
The movement of form is light . As mentioned above, we cannot directly perceive form and movement. Nor can we fully perceive their fusion— light . Only a small part of it (called color ) is accessible to perception.
All sensations of movement and color are simulated by humans using a computer. A new virtual world is practically created, the only things missing to complete it are the senses of taste, smell, and touch. And people are constantly trying to make virtual reality more and more like the real world.
God, who created the world, created man in his own image and likeness. The human desire to create and invent is that part of God with which he endowed us, and by possessing it, we become like gods. Art is a manifestation of this desire to create and fashion one’s own world, like God. Previously, creators created only individual parts of the world they conceived; now, coordinated teams of creators create entire imaginary worlds.
There’s a universal rule: “90% of everything created in this world is complete garbage and not worth your attention.” This rule applies to art and all its forms individually. In every medium—music, film, and computer games—only about 10% of all works created are true masterpieces; the rest is garbage, making up the 90%. There’s nothing good about it, but it’s necessary; garbage is the dark background against which the remaining 10% shines brightly.
Classification, types and forms of art
Let’s analyze all the forms of art created by humanity according to the composition of their sensations.
Click on the image to enlarge it
We begin by examining the diagram from the bottom up. We examine a person and identify all their senses: the nose (smell), tongue (taste), skin (touch), eyes (sight), and ears (hearing). Then there’s what evokes their senses: the entire body and the mouth (vocal cords). And finally, there’s what ultimately processes all the senses—the brain.
Encoding. All feelings can be encoded: thought can be encoded into text, sound, movement, color, and form; sound can be encoded into text or image; form is encoded as color; and, in general, anything that has no form, anything that consists only of waves—color (as well as form encoded into color), movement, sound, thought—can all be encoded as a sequence of “0”s and “1”s.
The nose perceives smells, and the only human activity that engages these senses is perfumery . It’s highly questionable to call perfumery an art, but calling it a lower art (as opposed to “high art”) is certainly possible. Smells, in the physical sense, are the recognition of chemical elements in a gaseous state.
The tongue perceives tastes, and again, there is only one form of human activity that engages these senses— cooking . But cooking is more complex; it involves the creation of smells, flavors, and forms. It also belongs to the lower arts. Taste, in the physical sense, is the recognition of chemical elements in any state, unlike smells, but only in close proximity.
The skin perceives the touch of other physical objects. Sensations of form are used in all forms of design , in the visual arts , and in sports ( e-sports and martial arts are among the arts of sport ). Form is only directly perceived in close proximity, so its sensations are most often perceived at a distance through color coding.
The eyes perceive color, which carries the most information about the surrounding world. As already mentioned, it encodes form and movement, and all art forms related to them also relate to color. But the primary art form for the eye is the visual arts, which, with the advent of specialized devices, has been expanded into photography and animation .
Movement perceived by the eyes, which includes the already mentioned sport, as well as dance .
Theater is at the intersection of movement and sound . Sounds themselves are used in more complex art forms and are further subdivided by form into music , singing , and speech. Speech—sounds that convey thoughts—includes oratory and poetry (a more musical form of speech). Music, singing, and poetry combined produce a musical composition (song) . Song combined with dance forms a concert . The concept of “concert” encompasses a musical concert, circus (sports, dance, music, humor), opera (dance, singing), and ballet (dance, music). With the advent of audio recordings, all sound arts are preserved as audio recordings.
The sound form “speech” contains thought. But with the advent of text, thought can also be created and stored as text, without the use of speech (text is encoded in color (black and white) and perceived by the eyes, but ultimately, in the brain, it is perceived as a thought, not a color). Writing itself can be an art— calligraphy . But the most important thing is the thoughts contained within this text. Humor is a special kind of thought . Whether it is art at all is debatable. But in our country, it is certainly a distinct art form. It includes such forms as jokes, parodies, and gags. Text is used in more complex forms: in literature (books) and the press (newspapers, magazines), with additional use of images in the form of photographs.
The higher up on the diagram, the newer the information carriers that store works of art.
With the advent of video recording, old art forms were transformed. Theater was transformed into cinema . Musical compositions into video clips . Other forms of movement and sound art—animation, sports, dance, concerts—remained unchanged, but became available as recordings.
With the advent of computers and the binary storage system, most previous information carriers (such as images, video, audio, and text) could be encoded and stored in this binary system without modification. Some old art forms were transformed by the computer into new ones: design and animation into modeling , text and movement into programming . And on the basis of these new arts, even more complex ones emerged: computer and video games (modeling (design, image, animation), theater (movement, sound, music, speech), programming (movement, text), and websites (programming (movement, text), press, animation).
At the very top of the diagram are the information intermediaries.
Designs, images and photographs can be found at exhibitions.
Animations and films are created and distributed in film studios.
Musical compositions are replicated in music studios.
Literature and the press are distributed by book publishing houses.
Computer games are created and distributed in computer studios and publishing houses.
Television distributes everything that can be encoded in video.
Radio distributes everything that can be encoded into audio.
The Internet distributes everything that can be encoded in a binary system.
A more correct, but also more difficult to understand diagram of the types of art. To enlarge the image, click on it.
Conclusion
Thus, computer games are a composite art form, comprised of many previous art forms. And the internet is a vast, publicly accessible museum of almost every known form of creativity.
The only difference from classical art is that this is new and unfiltered information. Masterpieces on the internet are placed on the same shelves next to low-quality works that will be forgotten in a week. Only a few specialists can navigate the informational diversity of this oversaturated market. We, on this website, will help you navigate the turbulent flow of the most contemporary art form.
