Art is an amazing philosophical topic and has been for thousands of years.

Giving Art a definition is hard, especially since right away some confusions arise regarding the boundaries of Art.

If you take the position that everything is art some interesting problems come up. for instance: this would also imply that taking a shit is art. While that might be justifiable in some sense, this way of understanding our topic is always going to be hard because there are a huge number of competing universal ideas (IE: Science, History, Philosophy, Linguistics, etc.)... what about these things? It might be argued that they all apply to art. Science as an art seems like it could be given a reasonable defense but how could one defend the art of linguistics without building a position on language to do it? Good question, right?

If we suppose that Art is something(s), the job becomes one of distinguishing the members of this set from one another as well as the things lying outside the scope of our subject.

Is art imitation? What about the crazy things kids draw? What about the wildest imaginations even here on dA? The visions of madness that people come up with would be really hard to account for even within a community like this which excludes the ACTUALLY mad...

Is art inspiration? Inspiration is a bummer explanation because it's a really confusing topic all by itself... and wait a second, don't people say they need inspiration FOR their art? that would seem to draw it away from being art itself and it doesn't seem like that's the only example of where they're necessarily different.

Is art communication? To accept this we'd have to also agree that someone screaming for help while running away from an angry dog is a matter of art rather than some other urgency.

Saying art is nothing is odd right from the start and insists that the people approaching the idea this way have an agenda in mind. That's not bad, but it's also not normally what people think art unless a huge number of people presented with this idea agree that art is nothing without being coaxed or alternatively that they'd disagree over it being misleading to suggest art is nothing.

So the most reasonable approach appears to be assuming that Art is something(s), but it still seems that identifying what that means is a challenge still...

The reason I ask is because it seems clear to me that a massive degree of focus has been taken from the artistic aims of this community and redirected at things that aren't really about the art or show off like they're art but without any real reason for claiming so.


The social justification of art is totally reasonable but we never needed to create an intricate underlying social system here... that's not really a problem as long as the people participating in it maintain an awareness of what this place is all about. But what about the fan pics or worse; what about the social photos... least awesomely: what about the overwhelming number of explicit pieces especially nude women??? I love naked people, you guys... but there's an imbalance here to say the least and I'd wager at least some of the "art" that goes on here is legitimately muddying the waters when it comes to getting a clear view of what art really is and what it ultimately means to this community.

Every time I come here to find more naked people just being naked with absolutely no effort to provide an artistic thesis for the work... or the images crafted of explicit provocative content with no defense other than the appeal to provocation... these are inadequate ends for the purposes of an art community, especially one who's history is ground in a real concern and interest in what art ultimately means to us as artists.

I've thought about this some over the years as I've watched this place, so I decided to write some things down here. If people actually respond to it, I might make it a deviation at some point to get more people thinking about it.