What is Art?

I keep coming back to this question over and over again lately. So I'm going to post a bit that came up yesterday during the final critique for the Engaged Art Class, and FiberAwareness Project [link] (which I think I will actually try and keep going for now in some capacity). So, anyway no long rambling word vomit today, too much to do and too many places to go that are not sitting in front of my computer.

I've been thinking that perhaps the question is wrong. What is art? Art is a generally broad term, it's rather like human. What would you say if I asked you what is human? Human are people, animals are animals, plants are plants, humans are sentient, etc. However, what we do is we do not necessarily define the 'state of human' we categorize it within another definition within another label, within another state. So what if the question is not really, 'what is art?', but something more along the lines of, 'What categories should we put under art?'

Until more recently I've always rather told myself that I considered any form of creation art. However, in taking classes that look at art and work in a different way and different bodies of work and different ways of considering art; I've had to ask myself if that statement is true. My reactions to some of the stuff in my Digital class and in the Engaged Art class are, 'That's not art!' But what is being show is a form of creation, something that someone worked on, spent time on and made. Thus by the previous definition in my head it should be art.

So what is the socially ingrained response that says, 'this isn't art?' If that isn't art in my head then what exactly is it?

If art is this broad category that in its most simple form says something along the lines of; creation (action/experience) = art

Be it the act of snapping an image, doodling on the bathroom wall, mom cooking in the kitchen, my sister finger knitting, my dad fixing a car, or a weaving or a drawing, to a display of information, a website, etc.

Then what categories fall under the broader heading of 'art', the generalized, main stream, typically thought of as art. There are a few terms that come to mind but I don't really like them such as; high art, craft, etc. However, I feel that there should be something better...