This topic is something I have been grappling with for over a decade. My thoughts around what makes something art have gone through a long evolution over this period, finally reaching (hopefully) a level where my mind won’t have to wrestle with it anymore.
What is Art?
Art comes in varied forms. Some of them are as follows:
Literary work (poem, short story, essay, novel, etc.)
Music (singing, instrumental music, sounds produced in any other way)
Body movement (dance, gymnastics, flexing, etc.)
Visual (painting, photograph, film, animation, and so on)
Object (statuette, other physical objects)
Anything that requires deftness
For something to be called art, a) it must arouse an emotion in the observer and b) it should be human-produced.
The emotion can be any emotion—happiness, excitement, sadness, surprise, nostalgia, peace, etc. Some of these emotions can be felt looking at a mountain or a forest too, but they are not human-produced, and therefore we don’t call them works of art.
Though the above criteria suffice to define something as art, it doesn’t solve the subjectivity that surrounds art. What is art according to some people may not be art according to other people. It is possible that some people may not feel any emotion looking at a piece that is considered art by others, and therefore it may not be art for them.
This is because, in addition to the above criteria, there is another important factor that goes into making something an art. That factor is context.
Example #1
Show a group of people a poem without telling them who the author is and ask them to rate it. Show another group of people the same poem and tell them it was written by Shakespeare, and ask them to rate it. You might find that the latter would rate the poem higher—because of the context. The fact that it was written by a great poet gets baked into their experience of the poem.
Example #2
Between a meticulously carved statuette made by a modern-day machine and a thousand-year-old piece of disfigured statuette, which one would you consider better art, a) without knowing the facts about them, and b) with the facts known?
Example #3
Make a group of people listen to a really lousily played instrument and ask them if they are moved and whether they would call it art. Hardly anyone would consider it art. Now tell them it was played by a four-year-old, and everyone will say the kid is an artist!
This means that the emotional experience of the observer cannot be credited to the object alone. Context is often, to a more or less degree, a part of the equation. It is the context that makes art subjective. If one does not have the context, or the context does not appeal to one, in that case, one may not view something as art which others do.
Context may not always be necessary for the observer to experience an emotion from the object and thus for the object to be called art. But sometimes (like in example #3), context may be all-important.
Now touching on the last form: anything that requires dexterity. Examples: cooking, martial arts, debating, seduction, etc. You see, they are completely different fields, and yet they are often classified as art. In this sense of the word, art is simply any skill that is achieved only through practice and that is not easily achieved by everyone.
This is the culmination of my over a decade-long struggle to define art. Hope you enjoyed the intellectual masturbation!