What is fine Art?

CAVE PAINTERS DIDN’T ATTEND ART SCHOOL

MOZART OR MUZAK

I described my process for creating a fine art original print in this blog post.

In this in-depth article, I’ll provide insights to the often misunderstood nature of fine art, which is not black or white while also begging the question: What is art? 

Whether you are a collector or have a desire to become a patron of the arts, then this relevant article will be of great interest and value. 

Is it music? Is it art? Who decides? The widescreen version is that it is all art, but the scope of that view needs defining—not for comparing, but for an awareness of distinguishing one form from another—fine art or mass-produced art, Mozart or Muzak.

What’s the difference between fine art and the other arts? In a phrase that should not be misunderstood: art for art’s sake. It is first art for the artist’s sake to fulfill a dharma (purpose in life) in transit; and then it is art born on its own for the sole purpose of being and making its way in the world.

MY JOURNEY TO THE SOURCE 

My observations are based in part on the legacy of art history and more personally on my unique firsthand thirty-year long odyssey to discover the wellspring of art. You will, I trust, develop and acquire a feeling for my art. Not all fine art regardless of definitions is created equally.

Let me set the stage on how I come to the art life, which orchestrates my understanding of art.

Much of the words and concepts in this post were taken from my groundbreaking primer for creators, An Artist Empowered: Define and Establish your Value as an Artist now. 

THE CATBIRD SEAT

My often daunting journey to the source of fine art included a rare opportunity not easily attained: a decade as the sole apprentice to a great Zen master artist. I not only watched him deal with life, but saw him paint nearly every afternoon for more than ten years. 

I was in the enviable catbird seat, a witness to the cornucopia of magic flowing onto paper or canvas mounted on the easel. Marvelous images from the collective unconscious streamed and transmuted along his shoulder and through his hand, and into my eyes and being. Whatever he did was his art from brilliant writing to being a master chef. In the Zen sense, he taught without teaching. He was the keeper of the flame.

This then is my sensibility in this foray into fine art. If one wants to know anything of value, one must dig deep. As Oscar Wilde observed: “Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” I would add that something worth knowing can be unleashed. 

DEFINITIONS ABOUND 

We can easily look up definitions of fine art that are broadly factual, but do not capture the soul, the aesthetic essence. 

A fine art general definition: creative art, especially visual art whose products are to be appreciated solely for imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content.

You will note that most definitions of fine art do not mention the artist’s source of the art. There is so much more. Let’s dig deeper, as I did. 

FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON

An aesthetic definition is a guidepost, not the thing itself, as in the Zen parable about the pointing finger at the moon. 

If you keep looking at the finger, you will never see the moon, the art, the fine art. In other words, you the art appreciator must do your due diligence to discover the sublime for its own sake. Collecting art solely for investment is another matter that transforms the art into a commodity. 

The term fine art itself is academic based on Western traditions going back to the Renaissance. More about that later. The fine art in question, as described in the general definition above isn’t the premeditated utilitarian art of business, advertising, decoration, commission, design, or flattery. The fine art here is ignited without motive through divine fire, which exacts a price that the artist must willingly pay, as observed by the noted psychiatrist Carl Jung who coined the term ‘collective unconscious’. 

FOR THE BIRDS

A perspective on placing academic labels on art is eloquently revealed in the 1973 documentary Painters Painting by filmmaker Emile de Antonio who interviewed many of the figures, including Barnett Newman, who, after the Second World War, had fueled the abstract expressionism movement in New York City. 

Barnett: “Yes, because many years ago at a conference in Woodstock that was held with a panel consisting of philosophers—aesthetes, really, professors of philosophy, professors of aesthetics—and artists, I declared that even if they were right, and even if they could build a system, an aesthetic system that they could claim explained the activity, the creative activity, it would be of no value, because aesthetics for the artist was as meaningful as ornithology must be for the birds.”

There are reasons collectors are drawn to original fine art aside from its increasing value over time. Fine art from the soul, from intuition, from divine fire is alive and takes us deeper into the meaning and purpose of our existence. It is fine art that can’t be demystified or pinned down, precisely because it is real magic. It is the fine art that you must discern on your own. Likewise, it is the work that transcends definitions and comparisons.

This art is what the French refer to as having that ‘je ne sais quois’—an indefinable something, which for our purposes is art from the spirit: art conjured into existence from the collective unconscious by the sorceress who isn’t ambivalent or confused about what fine art is and what it is not.

DEFINING OUR TERMS / ART IS WORK

As the word ‘artist’ itself over the long centuries has taken on various meaning, expression, and purpose, debating and comparing the merits between disciplines is a trap. It is much simpler and accurate to agree that excellence in anything, including any art form—the applied arts, crafts, and fine art—is rare. 

As previously mentioned, definitions are not the things that they are describing. A definition of a chair, for example, is not the chair itself, as it exists in space-time. 

The concise and practical definition below by American graphic designer Milton Glaser whose designs include the now iconic I Love New York logo, lays out a foundation for appreciating art including fine art, which is a label describing a particular type of art that must be viewed within a context, in the same way music has many forms—from the deep soul feeling of Jazz to culturally anemic cotton candy. 

In the introduction to his book, Art is Work, Glaser writes: “There seems to be much confusion about what we mean when using the word art. I have a recommendation. We eliminate the word art and replace it with work and develop the following descriptions:”

1. Work that goes beyond its functional intention and moves us in deep and mysterious ways we call great work. 

2. Work that is conceived and executed with elegance and rigor we call good work. 

3. Work that meets its intended need honestly and without pretense we call simply work. 

4. Everything else, the sad and shoddy stuff of daily life, can come under the heading of bad work. 

Glaser provides us with an art barometer, but the question of what is great work, fine art, other than simile, remains. Do you know it when you see it, when you feel it? What is the artist’s body of work? Is the artist’s work persevering against the torrential conformity of the mainstream to reach heaven’s gate? Does the artist speak to you?

To piggyback on Milton Glaser’s astute take on art: Anything accomplished with attention to detail, great care, passion, and love can be elevated from the ordinary to artfulness—from folding napkins, arranging flowers, cooking, serving tea, handwriting, or making tools—anything. Japanese are especially adept in this area, as most everything in their traditional culture is artfully done and presented. The takeaway here is to avoid the artificial trap of competition, as excellence is available in all art forms. 

ARE YOU TALKING TO ME? / IT BEGINS WITH THE ARTIST

Art is a language. To understand the art, one must comprehend the artist’s vocabulary. As with any new language, one needs to be aware of syntax, words and their meaning to comprehend and to speak in that tongue. 

Discussing labels and distinctions in art without meaningful context and consideration of the source would be superficial. Fine art as meaningful work is mostly deemed impractical in contemporary society, which ironically in some cases makes it all the more valuable. Such an uphill test does not deter the true artist with a vision from expressing her fine art.

Still, those who do ‘make it’ in the arts for whatever reason are held in high and nearly reverential esteem by the same society that places little value on the artist. Mixed messages abound, but not for those who know better. 

If the art was made with the consumer in mind, then it is manufactured art. If created for the divine magic of it with no other ulterior motive, then it is fine art by definition, but all fine art is not of the same clarity or quality. Does a painting of a soup can selling for millions of dollars elevate your awareness?

YOU WERE ON MY MIND / BETWEEN THE CRACKS

If the artist were producing commercial art, the type readily understood by a public weaned on advertising, then her chances for acceptance were much greater than an artist making personal fine art. To carve out a life based upon a personal art that isn’t part of the popular culture takes guts and the conviction to advance the mission by creating despite the opinions others. Fine art challenges the viewer to participate in both the meaning and the creation, which is no less demanding than making the art itself.

WHOM DO YOU TRUST?

One can rely on others to define art for them, or one can trust to find out for themselves when they realize that they are not looking for Waldo, especially in abstract fine art. Here’s an apt example of collectors trusting the opinions of others instead of their aesthetic. 

In Art and Investing, a perceptive piece by Robert Donahue, a freelance writer, art critic and collector of work by emerging artists, writes: “A collector who approaches art with the mentality of an investor needs to have either a great deal of luck, or the capability to purchase works by artists that already have a solid market value, like Rembrandt or van Gogh. Many speculators purchasing art in the 80’s art boom were in the end sorely disappointed. Artwork that was purchased for tens of thousands at so called ‘important’ and trendy galleries cannot be resold today on a street corner for fifty bucks. These galleries, designated ‘important’ by The New York Times, are now obscure memories, lost to an unrecorded history, and the ‘important’ art dealers who ran them and authenticated the value of the art are now, if they survived the epidemic, selling burritos or working at computer stations in graphic design and website houses.”

EXPLAIN AWE

The concept of both art and artist has changed, evolved over the eons to the way art and artist are perceived in modern times.

Another crucial and empowering point to realize is that no one, including the museum director, critic, or gallery owner knows more about art than you do. At first, this may sound cheeky, but not if you own your power—meaning that no one can bedazzle you with pretentious nonsense. 

Over the years, I found it both eye-opening and alarming to have met noted art teachers, critics, academicians, and other art aficionados who focused on dogma, rationalizations, and the irrelevant instead of the art’s essence. Like kids with their noses pressed up against the window of a candy store, these self-appointed mavens of art could see the candy beyond the pane, but the secret ingredients, how it is made and from what source, or how it tastes remained out of reach. 

CAVE PAINTERS DIDN’T ATTEND ART SCHOOL

From the dim twilight of human evolution, there was art before there was the spoken word of language. Human ‘modern’ culture is over 40,000 years old; our ancestors not only survived, they made art: necklaces and carvings that transcended the utilitarian. Cave painters during Paleolithic times of 30,000 years ago didn’t attend art school to produce their masterpieces; their representational systems for connecting to the spirit gives us evidence of symbolic thought. In fact, a “cognitive revolution” was unearthed during a dig of the Middle Stone Age between 70,000 to 100,000 years ago in Blombos Cave in South Africa. Archaeological deposits revealed that our far distant relatives made spear points, bone tools, enigmatic symbolic engravings and beads made from seashells. 

Using words to describe art is conceptual and antithetical to feeling its essential nature—an art lesson taught to humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow by his artist wife. Of course, writing about art has its place as historical interest. How would you describe awe or unique? No matter how beautifully or poignantly expressed, can words truly describe the feeling of love? It can only be described tangentially and metaphorically via simile. No matter how well I convey the deepening orange hues and modulations of a setting sun to a blind man, he still can’t see it—but he might feel something from the passion of my expression. 

Fine art is also defined as “a visual art considered to have been created primarily for aesthetic and intellectual purposes and judged for its beauty, balance, and meaningfulness, specifically, painting, sculpture, drawing, watercolor, graphics, and architecture.”

GREY MATTER / NOT BLACK OR WHITE

Fine art in today’s world carries on the tradition of being non-utilitarian or often in the abstract, as in art formalism where the art is not about something else, but the subject itself. The other issue remains. What is the source and quality of that art? If dedicated, a collector will soon realize this: Is the art better or different?

If the art is magic, then its creation is magic. I have witnessed this mystery firsthand. I have also watched many artists paint, which provided me with a reliable metric for understanding the source or wellspring of art.

Fine art is an umbrella label for different forms of expression: there is, for example, an exquisite realistic painting before the invention of the camera by Johannes Vermeer (referred to as a craftsman in his day) of a 17th century domestic scene in Dutch life in Delft, Netherlands; and then there is a bold nonobjective work by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky who kept faith with his paintings (he often named them ‘compositions’) to resonate on the same ethereal plane as music. But, there are questions. Going beyond strict definitions, both qualify as fine art, even though one was a commission and the other by Kandinsky created without a need to please.

Michelangelo who thought himself more a sculptor than a painter created the Sistine Chapel. Was the grand work non-utilitarian art or public relations for the Vatican and Pope Sixtus IV who had commissioned the work? Again by definition, Rembrandt’s commissioned portraits would be excluded from the fine art genre, yet no one would argue that it’s not fine art. This is the gray area that does clear up for the astute collector who appreciates the art for its uniqueness and power to evoke emotion.

Do labels matter if the art lifts one’s soul to a marvelous domain. What would Barnett Newman’s birds think of all this analyses. As the Zen master had observed: All comparisons in art are a trap. 

Whatever your perception of art and artist had been in the past, it is time for an unambiguous understanding in this present moment to confirm or not what you know. When you know who you are, when you know your dharma (your purpose in life), when you know how you feel, no one can confound you with bedtime stories about what is or is not ‘important’ art. 

SEARCH FOR THE REAL

In his book, Search for the Real, Hans Hofmann is describing a guide to the essence of fine art: “Art is magic. So say the surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic. To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.”

Would you know the art in front of you is magic? How would you know? If the artist says it’s magic, would you simply take his word for it? Once you have the feeling to see on your own, there is no turning back. Fine art is alive; it has a pulse. 

When the Spanish Surrealist artist Salvador Dali was asked what message do you want the public to get from your paintings, he replied: “No message.” Dali knew it was up to the viewer to supply meaning. 

THE ARTIST’S INTENTION

In European academic traditions, fine art over time developed for personal aesthetics, distinguishing it from the decorative or applied arts that also served a functional purpose, such as pottery, metalwork, or jewelry. 

Aesthetic theories that were developed during the Italian Renaissance concluded that the highest art was the unfettered expression of the artist's creative ability, unrestricted by practical considerations such as in making and decorating a flower vase or constructing a chair. Making fine art did not involve dividing the work among different individuals with specialized skills, as had been the fashion in the guild workshops of master artists in the 15th century. 

By vigorously delineating the difference between arts and crafts, one academy in France etched an indelible distinction that is with us to this day in the development of Western art. Founded in Paris (1648), the Académie des Beaux-Arts referred to the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture as the beaux-arts, or the ‘fine arts’.

Kenneth Clark, in his monograph, Leonardo da Vinci, illustrates how artists were generally perceived during the Renaissance in this scenario of Andrea Verrocchio’s Florence atelier: “Leonardo in his master’s workshop held a position not unlike that of a head cutter in a small but distinguished firm of tailors, and it was natural that the proprietor, though himself a capable homme du métier, should leave to his gifted assistant that part of the work in which he himself had least interest.” 

Despite tradition, the fine arts at the time of Verrocchio were not static, as a hierarchy of genres developed based on the inexplicable creative force and subject; as this era was before the invention of the camera, it’s little wonder that historical representation and portraiture were in higher demand than a vase with a bouquet.

Architecture in our modern age is in its own realm of fine art. Although mostly commissioned and not collectible, buildings featuring artistic expression can also portray an art aspect for its own sake in the design. 

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET

What have we learned about fine art? You have absorbed many descriptions, and perhaps most important, not to compare, but knowing the difference is a door opener. In contemporary fine art, as in the recent past, the artist’s personal concept or intention is paramount, regardless of the expressed medium.

How do I know what’s what, you may ask yourself? Trusting your intuition to feel the art one way or another, will place you on solid ground that is not open to gullibility. 

Does the art you are viewing speak to you? What does it say? Can you distinguish magic from hype and crass exhibitionism, from fine art to fluff? There is an art to seeing that evolves and emerges over time. 

NO DESSERT / INNATE, BUT NOT INEVITABLE

Here is more for widening perspective.

Art the fine art variety flows from the wellspring of creation to a destination, as a form no one can predict; it is the aware artist who holds the divining rod. It took eons of evolution to place us in the enviable position of recognizing the power of intuition, which is innate, but not inevitable. Without distinctions, there would be desert but no dessert. 

As the painter and teacher Hans Hofmann, whom I’ve quoted earlier, wrote more than half a century ago: “The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature—translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive and every work of art should be alive.” 

ART WARS

Taking combative conceptual positions in the arena of art as part of an opportunistic strategy may bring an artist media attention, and even coveted grants. Such contrivance, however, results in a pyrrhic victory of sorts, as it is the authentic artist and an unaware public who gets burned in the process, as Robert Donahue had so clearly described about the art hype and cons in New York City during the 80’s. 

Lynne Munson, cultural critic, author of Exhibition: art in the era of intolerance, and an ‘art war correspondent’ bares open the underbelly of art today from the trenches, as posted on the Independent Women’s Forum website:

“To varying degrees, the artists who start these art wars are exhibitionists, baiting public sensibility in order to call attention to themselves. [For example, the Battle of Piss Christ, Mapplethorpe’s Last Stand, the Finley Offensive and the Great Dung War.] These ‘shock’ artists are actually the new academy. The safest work an artist can market today, in terms of having a career, and getting a gallery, and winning prizes and grants, is shock art. And every time the artist is attacked in the art wars, claims are made that this is the avant-garde of our time, that Michelangelo and all the maverick artists of their day were criticized and misunderstood. Well, the shock artists are not mavericks; they’re doing the safest thing you could possibly be doing in the art world right now.”

PICASSO REDUX / INTUITIVE FINE ART

LEAP OF FAITH

Today, despite our definitions, what is “fine art” is somewhat murky, but not for the astute art aficionado who realizes that you cannot have an aesthetic moment through the eyes of others. 

Pure artistic expression can involve any art form that is not a commissioned work meant for a utilitarian purpose. The true and aware artist knows where he stands; this includes the collector who has done his or her work to understand and feel a new language of art before them. Music and dance are art expressions. There are the strict rules of classical ballet and then there is free-form jazz—the abstract expressionism of music. There is Mozart with notes from up high and then there is Muzak written to drone on in the background. 

All art isn’t from the soul, from intuition, as in the Zen sense where one gets from here to there through a leap of faith, not thinking. This isn’t a point of separation or a comparison; it is a distinction that each collector of fine art appreciates from personal experience.

Intuition transcends the limitations of cognitive thinking, which is a clue to the source of the art. Conceptualizing what a painting will look like in advance is premeditated artwork. Then, there is not knowing what will happen, destination unknown, which is the enviable ticket to adventure in the collective unconscious. The artist trusts his intuition to guide his brush on that blank canvas. The aware collector trusts her feelings, not the critical yea or nay opinions of others. 

You can read about my art making in my Artist’s Statement: Art of the Covenant .

CONCLUSION:

Picasso’s Guernica painting of war atrocities was a commission. Does by strict definition rule it out of the fine art category? What say you? At some point, if you’re dedicated, you will trust your feelings, your intuition—the gateway to knowing. And by the way, does the minimalist painting Black Over Yellow by Ellsworth Kelly elevate your spirit or leave you flat? Is it fine art or exhibitionist art of its time? 

I trust that I have provided sufficient information for you to consider in better understanding the broadly factual definition of fine art. There is more to it than a label. There are various layers of this genre depending on intent and the source of the art. The collector must do her work to distinguish the truth about the emperor’s new clothes. As any artist can claim anything to be fine art because it was not a commission, the well-informed collector is challenged to discern between blatant forgettable exhibitionism and art emanating from the divine spirit. 

Patrons: It’s not the medium, it’s where the art comes from that matters.

You the art collector, as noted earlier, are not looking for some elusive Waldo, especially in abstract work. What you see is what you get, and if you see it, then it’s there. Artists must define their work for themselves while perceptive collectors come to their own conclusions. 

When a potential collector asked me to describe my art, I thought this: I am an intuitive channel in the Zen sense who in a leap of faith transcends thinking to access the divine fire of the collective unconscious: the wellspring of all great art.

But, simpler is better, so I replied: In my art, I don’t copy reality, I add to reality.