"Art"

I have a love-hate relationship with "art." I love going to art museums, but I only really appreciate about 10% of the stuff that's in them. I'm not just talking about modern art. I'm talking about everything from ancient China to the Renaissance to Matthew Barney.

Regarding historical art: I'm not sure why, but most of it strikes me as boring. Yes, I appreciate the fact that it's difficult. Yes, I understand that these art forms were totally new forms of expression in their day. Most of it just does not strike me as being beautiful or interesting. When it comes to art, I initially judge according to my gut feeling, and my gut feeling toward oil paintings of landscapes and marble statues of Greek gods is "I'm bored of this." Maybe that makes me ignorant. Maybe I just don't have any interest in history (I always hated history class). I don't know.

Regarding modern art: Much of it is ugly. Much of it is confusing. Yes, much of it is also interesting, but some of it requires little to no skill. It is often just raw, ugly expression.

Now, I didn't want to immediately dismiss historical art for being boring, or modern art for being ugly, so I had to ask myself the question: What makes good art? Or even more abstract: what makes art?

Obviously volumes upon volumes of books have been written on art, and I am by no means qualified to write an authoritative work on the subject, but I wanted to try to define it myself — to define it in a way that made sense to me. And after pondering it for several months, here's my current hypothesis: Art is an artificial category.

To me, "art" appears to have two main components: form and function — form being the aesthetic quality or beauty of the work (this is another giant topic in itself, I know), and function being the purpose of the work. Both of these qualities definitely exist, each can be done well or done poorly, and they can coexist. (Whether they can exist completely separately is debatable, but not really important right now.) Some art emphasizes form over function: it is beautiful, but doesn't seem to serve any purpose or communicate any specific ideas. It's just pretty. Other art emphasizes function over form: it tries to serve some purpose, often communicating a big idea or world view, but it might be stunningly ugly.

Here's the problem that I see: Form and function appear in every facet of life, in every human craft or skill. You can create a category called "art," that is defined by these two qualities, but that's like creating a category called "stuff." The category has no meaning. Nothing limits what can be included in it. There are watches that are stunningly complex and beautiful. Why aren't they in art museums? Industrial and graphic design departments crank out things every single day that are more functional and beautiful than much of the art that I see in museums. God's creation is amazingly beautiful and incomprehensibly complex in the way it functions. Can't we just appreciate form and function in everyday life, and put the finest examples of them in the museums? Why do we need a separate, poorly defined category? Is it just to create an aristocracy, where famous artists can display their own and their friends' stuff? Because that's what it seems like to me.

If anyone can give me a better definition of art that can help me make sense of and better appreciate it, I would be grateful, but I think my system of form and function makes sense, even if "art" doesn't.