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And just to make it ridiculously easy for all of you out there to critique my thinking here is the text for you philosophizing pleasure:
“Who?”
Who can make art? What being out of all the creatures on the earth has the capacity to make art?
Before answering this question we need a working definition of art. For now let us use a basic definition of art as something made with the intention of being beautiful or decorative, something made to evoke emotion or thought.
Out of all the beings that inhabit our cosmos there is only one that can actually do things with an intention other than its basic end, and that is Man. A bird can build a nest, but only a human being can build a concert hall or a cathedral. The tenets of evolution determine how animals build/make things. Again, a bird can make a nest that looks beautiful, but the reason that the bird built it was that it was the best nest it could build to survive in that location.
It could be argued that there is beauty found in nature, such as in the trees or also in the stars scattered across the night sky. While there is indeed beauty there, it is there because trees and stars have it in their nature to look the way they do. They do not ‘will’ to look the way they do.
It all comes down to being able to intend the end of an object to something other than survival, and the only being that can do that is Man. As far back as we can look into mankind’s past we see people making objects or pictures with no useful end in mind. From cave art to statuettes early Man made objects that had no useful purpose in regards to survival.
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| Charcoal Cave Art |
This leads into another question about who can make art. Art being within the realm of Man, are all people able to make art, or does the making of art belong to a few people? Society today, and indeed society for the past 3,000 years or so, seems to say that a select few “artists” are the ones who are to make art. The rest of humanity is to enjoy the art made by the few.
I argue the opposite. Art is something that can be made by anyone, no matter what training or occupation one has. There are different degrees to art, though that is a topic for later, and all human beings are capable of reaching at least the first degree.
Working off the bare bones definition of art as something made with the intention of being beautiful, art is something made for an end other than what is useful. If this is the case even children make art. When a baby stacks blocks one on top of the other he is making a sort of art, the child is making something [a tower] that has absolutely no useful purpose.
Conclusions/assumptions made:
- Art is something made for an end other than for its usefulness
- Being able to intend the end of something other than for basic survival is necessary in order to make something that does not have a useful end
- Humans are the only beings that we know of possessing self-consciousness
- Human beings are the only beings capable of making art
- All humans are able to make art