Art is the first leg of the three-legged stool that is writing, and possibly the most difficult to talk about because it is abstract. All of the definitions I could find talk about expression, creativity, beauty, emotion, and imagination – all of which are ideas rather than anything that can be seen or touched. This means that there is no absolute physical reference that one can use to decide if one’s notion of beauty, creativity, etc. is accurate or not. One can look at a table and say “This table wobbles,” and anyone else who looks at the wobbly table will agree. If one says “That painting is ugly” or “That statue isn’t creative,” though, it is highly likely that at least some of the other people who look at it will disagree.
People still try to make definitive statements about art, of course. “That isn’t creative” is one of the common criticisms one hears about works of art, followed closely by “There’s no emotion in it” and “It’s unimaginative.” What all these things mean, though, isn’t the same as “That rock is flat on one side” or “There is no water in that bucket.” They mean that the critic has seen enough similar works that he/she thinks this one isn’t particularly creative, that the subject or execution of the work didn’t raise emotion in the particular viewer, or that the work isn’t showing the critic anything new or startling. Which may be perfectly true…for that particular commentator. To other people, it may be unique, heartbreaking or uplifting, and a revelation.
Another problem is that you can’t tell by looking at a painting or reading a novel exactly what went into it from the artist’s perspective. A reader who has read hundreds of space operas may look at the latest one and think it is imitative and unimaginative, not realizing that the writer has never read even one other space opera and is by any objective standard being amazingly inventive and creative, even though what they’re doing is re-inventing the wheel. Conversely, a writer may be deemed fresh and new and creative for inventing characters or plot twists that he/she actually borrowed from somewhere the reader or critic isn’t familiar with – a different genre the person doesn’t read, for instance, or a set of obscure myths.
One result of all this is that people try to set rules for what makes a piece of art into Art with a capital “A.” This tends not to work very well for very long, even when somebody can get a large enough group of people to agree about what the rules are, because sooner or later – usually sooner – somebody will point out that Shakespeare or Homer or Titian or Rodin didn’t do X (or did do Y that “Art” isn’t supposed to do), and they are certainly Art.
Another result of the desire to codify “good art” is that people turn to things that can be measured – is the viewpoint consistent? Does the writer misuse passive voice or overuse adverbs? – and try to make these into rules. This is slightly more successful than trying to measure things like beauty, creativity, or emotion, because often one can look at a piece of writing and say “That viewpoint wobbles” and have most people agree, just as they would about a wobbly table. The trouble is, this stuff falls under my definition of craft, rather than art.
In my personal and idiosyncratic opinion, art – and, perforce, Art – is a very personal thing. This makes it incredibly hard to come up with a clear definition that is accepted by even a narrow majority. The lack of a clear definition, in turn, makes it pretty much impossible to tell people what should be considered good art or explain to them how to make it.
The fact that this frustrates pretty much everyone doesn’t make it any less true. The “art” part of writing is, therefore, the least teachable. Even for the most analytical of writers, the “art” leg of the stool ends up being intuitive and largely a matter of feel. It’s one of those things one learns by experience – lots of experience, of both reading and writing – and then can’t really articulate clearly once one has learned it (which is especially frustrating to writers, because putting things into words is supposed to be our stock in trade.
About the only advice I can provide about the Art leg of the stool is attitudinal. If artistic merit is one of those “we know it when we see it” things that are next to impossible to identify in one’s own work – and I really do think it is – and if it is likewise something that one learns from experience, then the only thing one can do is focus on getting that experience (by reading and writing a lot).
Fretting about one’s work as art will, more than likely, just get in the way.
Craft, the second leg of the stool, is a completely different matter. I’ll talk about that next time.
NB: Patricia C. Wrede wrote this post. CS only posted it. Pay no attention to the blog byline.
I kind of agree with the whole “I know it when I see it” aspect. For me, if I like it, then it classifies 🙂
Craft is knowing where to begin; Art is knowing when to stop.
There’s a phrase in Spanish, “el arte de saber callar.” That translates as “the art of knowing how to shut up.” Or, if you wish, where and when to shut up. There’s a medieval Spanish ballad about a prince walking near the sea, who saw a marvelous ship whose sailor is singing a song that makes the birds perch on the mast and the fish rise to the surface to hear it. The prince says to the sailor, “Sing me that song again!”
“The sailor said to the prince,
indeed you shall hear what he said:
‘I sing this song to none
but to him who comes with me.’ ”
Another example, not from Spanish ballads but from _Beowulf,_ the ship-burial of Scyld:
“No one can say,
heroes under heaven, wise men in hall,
who received that cargo.”
I wish I could do that.
I don’t think that’s art so much as craft; it’s important to leave unexplained tendrils of possibly larger story in the text. (Of course, too many, and readers construct an incomplete something that isn’t what you wanted to write about. Which is more craft, to get the balance.) If you do that, the story in some sense neither ends, nor admits of being compact in the imagination.
Reading all of a particular author’s Liavek stories reminds me that the (probably) easiest way to do that is to know much more story and leave stuff out. (Which is how Lord of the Rings, that lament for the sweep of ten thousand years of fictional history, works….)
The other way around is nouns; put in some nouns you don’t explain, and there’s handles for other stories later. (I had a couple go-rounds with a copy-editor about not explaining anything about “some trouble of gaunts”; the character speaking wouldn’t, and the reader had no need to know in this story. But the whole seems larger for it.) The implication of other stories compels a reader to use a larger world as the setting for this one.
Art is when you can get people right in the feels with the few brief lines you don’t explain; that’s entirely culturally dependent. Lots of people for whom Scyld’s resting-place will have less resonance. (“Well, maybe no one did, maybe it just fell to the bottom of the sea and got encrusted with brachiopods…” which is modern and materialist and so not what the poet meant!)
Well, thank you, Graydon, maybe I’ll try some of that. The thing I’m currently working on is set in a time sufficiently far into the future that the terraforming of Mars and Venus happened so long ago, “before the Interregnum,” that there are only vague poetic legends as to how it was done, and I don’t have to invent it. Mars with canals, Venus with swamps, the way we all always wanted them. 🙂
To what extent does art, craft, and business correspond to the three rules?
1. You must write. (Art?)
2. You must finish what you write. (Craft?)
3. You must submit what you write for publication. (Business?)
The real fun is when the readers goes back and reads one of the classics and thinks it’s not creative or original because it’s a source.
I have prefaced discussions of Three Hearts and Three Lions with the observation that no, you do not hear dice rolling. D&D is based (in part) on it, not vice versa.
Rather like the numbskull who complained that _The Lord of the Rings_ was an imitation of _The Sword of Shannara._
Try this one:
http://www.dorktower.com/2002/02/25/comics-archive-268/
I had that problem the first time I saw King Lear performed. “That’s such a cliche… oh wait, no it’s not.”