HE WATCHES A FILM ABOUT THE EVENING SKY/IT WAS SOMEONE ELSE’S DREAM: So I finished Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (and its sequel, Reinventing Comics, of which more presently). I would tell you about it, but I think I need to reread some of the most interesting bits again, with favorite comics by my side for comparison. I really liked it, though, and thank Journalista! for the recommendation.

The bit that I wanted to write about is a bit that even McCloud seems a little embarrassed by in the sequel: his definition of art. The Rat and I had a long, long, rambly confab about this over the weekend, and although we came to few conclusions, I at least feel like I have a better sense of what my questions are. So this will be a scattershot post; some elements may conflict with or even blatantly contradict one another; if that happens, it’s because I haven’t quite figured out what I believe yet. So: thoughts on art.

First, I think we can dismiss McCloud’s initial suggestion as obscuring more than it illuminates: “Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction!” Quick problems with this definition: Some of the greatest art was made for money (think Shakespeare), thus it’s as survival-oriented as anything else we do for money…. Why denigrate cash on the nail as a motive for art? And all kinds of random things, from sodomy to mapping far-off galaxies (which McCloud classifies as “art as discovery”), have a connection to survival or reproduction that is, at best, pretty darn tenuous; yet it’s distinctly unhelpful to class these activities as art.

So. Enough. What’s my alternative, you ask?

I don’t really have one; but I’m not sure that’s a problem. It seems to me that every definition of art that is broad and narrow in the right places ends up looking ad hoc. Definitions that are not obviously wrong tend to be tightly pinned to a slew of wildly different works that everyone wants to call “art.” So the definition loses the abstraction that would have made it a useful tool for telling the difference between art and not-art. Instead of the definition telling us which things are art, we look to the things we already know are art and painstakingly stretch and pummel our definition until it fits their bizarre contours.

So I need a way of talking about art without talking about What Is Art. One way of doing this is to talk about what an artwork does–basically, review it, tell people why they should seek it out or avoid it. But in order to do that, we do need some kind of abstract vocabulary–a few reference points, so that when I compare one work to another you’ll have some sense of what I’m talking about.

Ratty and I talked about the four (I said three, but really there’re four) levels of artistic quality or achievement. I think this is maybe the Y axis of a two-axis graph, if we want to get all mathematical about it. The following categories are ways of classifying art I like–art I don’t like doesn’t register here: