“A true work of art is the revelation of a new conception of life arising in the artist's soul, which, when expressed, lights up the path along with humanity progresses.”
–Leo Tolstoy
Your man Tolstoy devoted twenty chapters to the question, What is Art? My glib response to Lev is “Art is craft on presentation.” A cloud in the shape of a turtle isn’t art, because it’s not crafted. A pile of lumber ain’t art until one chooses to present it. Art is the Canvas and the Frame.
Canvas is your handy synecdoche for craft, the part that dominates most art conversation: technique, the space-between-the-notes, the ten-dollar words. The less-talked-about Frame is everything not on display. The narratives supporting art’s presentation. The Frame includes:
The story of the human maker, his sacrifice1
The context in which she creates her work2
The history of the thing made3
The reaction of critics (and the reaction to the reaction)4
Even the price tag is part of the Frame.5
A conversation swirls as to whether automatons are allowed to make art. To date, the algorithms dazzle in their creation of near-instant artifacts, brushstrokes by the billions, poetry by the pound. But it’s all Canvas. What’s debatable is whether such “work” has a meaningful Frame.
(And none of this has anything to do with whether some art is “good” or “bad”, a pointless binary masquerading as philosophy.)
Art is both the made and the longing to make. It is the (admittedly insane) drive to gestate a living being and immediately subject him to the firing squad. There’s no real reason to do this, and this is why art remains a supremely human endeavor. It is the mastery of Canvas, and the mystery of the Frame.
Kumekina, V. 2024. "Masterpiece Story: The Starry Night." DailyArt Magazine.
Christiansen, S. 2015. "How Anne Frank's Diary Changed the World." The Smithsonian.
Zelazko, A., 2023. "Why Is the Mona Lisa So Famous?." Encyclopedia Britannica.
Reyburn, S. 2018. "Banksy Painting Self-Destructs After Fetching $1.4 Million at Sotheby's." The New York Times.
Sotheby’s. 2024. “The Banana That Broke the Internet” Sothebys.com.