Notes on Art 

What makes art unique in the world of objects is the intention to teach. There has for a long time been a struggle to differentiate art from craft: both art and craft use the same materials, the same skills, the same resources. And yet they never seem to sit comfortably together. Throughout the history of art there have been many attempts to differentiate art and craft that fundamentally rely on arbitrary often biased, sexist, and racist cultural views. The history of art theory is riddled with bias and cultural superiority.

So, efforts to distinguish art from the craft have been largely unsuccessful. I argue that the only thing that differentiates art from any other sort of thing in the world is intention. The artist creates with the intention to teach; the single thing that encompasses all art is a desire to reach out to another and convey information about the world, about the creator, about a way of being or experiencing. Art is subjective.

And of course, that seems like a facile point to make: beauty and art are in the eye of the beholder. But it is also this reflexivity that is unique to art. Art acts upon the subject, the experiencer - who in recognizing the act of creation, vitalizes the artwork and enters into an active relation with the work and the creator. Art is made with intention and experienced with intention. Art is transformed, made into art by the experience, both of creation and engagement.

Art is created. It is an intentional act: art exists because it is shaped by a mind expressing itself in the world. Art is then revitalized/reinvigorated/remade in the mind -in the experience- of the observer. To touch is to be touched and so reflexively on and on in an experiential loop.

To engage with a work of art is to take ownership of it to incorporate into yourself in an active relation. The artwork teaches and expresses a thought, an experience, a way of being and the observer then takes from that work, or discards from that work, their own understanding. The creation of art is an act of influence to choose to engage with art as a request to be taught, to learn, to be influenced.

We reach out to art to learn. Arts can be observed passively one can gloss over it move past. In that sense, an artwork is a mere object among other objects. It is only in active relation that art manifests its fullness. As a mere thing, art bears no special privilege. It is only in its context that it becomes art in any meaningful sense. 

Without active relation, art is merely decorative. Though even in that sense, it is not without value, since beauty, novelty, are in their own unique ways, fundamentally enriching to human experience. However, art draws upon beauty and novelty to illicit engagement in a deeper way, and thus open the path to relation, to learning, to understanding. Mere beauty is still a path to transcendence.

Art is transcendent in experience. To make and engage with art is transcendental. Art uses spectacle to induce communion. Art is a community engagement.