We Have Our Arts So We Wont Die of Truth Cited

What Is Art? A Few Famous Definitions, From Artifact to Today

Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Francis Ford Coppola, and more than endeavor to answer one of the ultimate questions.

Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Francis Ford Coppola, and more than attempt to respond one of the ultimate questions.

Russian writer and occasional philosopher of the arts, Leo Tolstoy (Wikimedia Commons)

After the recent omnibus of definitions of science past some of history's greatest minds and definitions of philosophy by some of today's most prominent philosophers, why not plough to an arguably even more nebulous domain of humanity? Gathered here are some of my favorite definitions of art, from antiquity to today.

Henry James in his short story The Middle Years:

We work in the dark—we do what we can—nosotros give what nosotros have. Our dubiousness is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of fine art.

Leo Tolstoy, in his essay "What Is Art?":

Fine art is not, every bit the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is non, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which human being lets off his excess of stored-upward free energy; it is not the expression of human being'southward emotions past external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union amid men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

Frank Lloyd Wright, writing in 1957, as cited in Frank Lloyd Wright on Compages, Nature, and the Human Spirit: A Collection of Quotations:

Art is a discovery and development of uncomplicated principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.

Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, i of five essential books on fear and the artistic procedure:

To labor in the arts for any reason other than beloved is prostitution.

Charles Eames, cited in the fantastic 100 Quotes by Charles Eames:

Art resides in the quality of doing; process is not magic.

Elbert Hubbard in a 1908 book of Footling Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers:

Art is not a thing—information technology is a way.

Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

Art is the virtually intense mode of individualism that the earth has known.

Thomas Merton in No Man Is An Island:

Art enables us to observe ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Francis Ford Coppola in a recent interview:

An essential chemical element of whatever art is risk. If y'all don't accept a risk so how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn't been seen before? I always similar to say that movie theater without gamble is like having no sex and expecting to accept a babe. You have to have a risk.

André Gide in Poétique:

Art begins with resistance—at the point where resistance is overcome. No human being masterpiece has ever been created without groovy labor.

Friedrich Nietzsche, made famous all over once again past Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing:

We have our Arts and then we won't die of Truth.

Michelangelo Pistoletto in Fine art's Responsibility:

To a higher place all, artists must not be but in art galleries or museums—they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people accept on, at every level.

Federico Fellini in a December 1965 piece in The Atlantic, not currently online:

All fine art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster'south autobiography.

Hugh MacLeod in Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity:

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it.

The Greek philosopher Aristophanes, writing in the fourth century B.C.:

Let each man practice the fine art he knows.

And, lastly, my own accept in a recent piece I wrote for the National Endowment for the Arts:

This is the ability of fine art: The power to transcend our own self-involvement, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more marvel, more wholeheartedness.

This post also appears on Brain Pickings, an Atlantic partner site.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/06/what-is-art-a-few-famous-definitions-from-antiquity-to-today/258871/

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