That's Not Art!

That’s not art!

I have no idea to what your exclaimation was referring. Probably some god awful, insulting affront to the very concept of "art" as you know it; a representation that belies an utter lack of skill, or some execution that required no thought or apparent intention whatsoever. Maybe it makes you feel like the talentless so-called artist is making fun of the entire institution. And you're outraged at the idea that somebody is calling that "art" when it so clearly affronts everything you have come to think of as "art". It's disgusting or profoundly unimpressive and you can't bring yourself to attach the honorable word "art" to such a thing.

Yeah but it's still art.

I hate to make you lose that war so easily. To let that person or A.I. casually claim such an honorary title. But that's how this works. Despite your outrage and rock solid, logical observations of plainly disqualifying attributes, that so-called "art"... is absolutely, 100% actual art.

So take the minute you need to swallow that reality whole.

I know you don't want to. Like so many before you throughout history you're overclocking right now. You're trying to concoct some definition of the word "art" that will disqualify this garbage because I have to be wrong. You know what art is.

You're thinking things like, "That’s not art. No skill or effort was involved in it whatsoever!"

"Not art. It was totally unintentional! Surely real art is at the very least thoughtful or communicates something!"

“Nope, not art. Nothing original. Just trite, dull and predictable.”

"That’s disgusting, revolting and an insult to the work of real artists."

I know, I know. Been there done that.

40 years ago I felt like you do. I was in art school, the California College of Arts and Crafts in the San Francisco Bay Area, and probably like you I deeply revered that word, "art". Maybe more so. I was paying some ungodly amount in tuition to associate with that word, so I came to regard it very highly.

And then came the day it all blew up and I was forced to rethink my world-view.

The Assignment

It was a foggy morning at CCAC in 1983. My roommate, Patrick and I had somehow uncharacteristically arrived early, and not stoned, outside the locked, condensation-wet door of our art room. We'd spent the entire week sweating over our art projects and today they would be presented and critiqued in class.

The assignment was deceivingly simple:

"Create a series of images."

That was it, the full brief. But this was art school so you never knew how these things would be interpreted. To wit, students were gathering at the door with all manner of strangely proportioned folios and carry boxes. I'd illustrated mine - it took forever. I'd painstakingly drawn and inked 48 separate, nearly identical images on artboard. Some students used photography, or sculpture or unique combinations.

Our breath made steam as we waited for our instructor to show up and unlock the door. Patrick and I wandered a little way off from the others to a picnic table and tried to keep warm.

One of our classmates, our friend, I'll call him Lenny, walked up casually, smoking a cigarette.

"What's with all the junk, losers?"

"This is my image sequence." I said.

Patrick added, "We're presenting our image sequences today."

Lenny froze with huge eyes.

"Shit...is that… that's today?"

"Yeah, that's today. Dude. You forgot!?" we laughed.

There was a beat as Lenny’s adrenaline levels rose.

"I'll be right back" he said, and tore off.

He was back a ridiculously quick 5 or 6 minutes later with a small, flat paper bag clearly from the school art store. He sat down with us at the picnic table, far from the other freezing students, and pulled out a brand new pad of paper as well as a single page of Letraset letters. A serif font as I recall. Letraset, for those of you born after 1984, was a kind of transparent plastic sheet with a very thin film of black vinyl letters that you could rub off, one-by-one, onto paper. Before computer fonts it's how you could relatively easily make covers or titles or other quality font-based projects without ink and painstaking effort.

Letraset demonstration by Mimmo Manes at Canefantasma.com

He dumped them on the table.

"Letraset?" I asked.

He was breathless, "It's all they had."

At that instant our instructor was spotted jogging up the pathway toward our class.

"Dude, you've literally got like two minutes."

"Good luck, man."

Lenny was just starting to rub off a letter "Z" onto a piece of paper. He was rushing, it didn't stick right, it tore. He swore, wadded the paper up, pulled another one and seemed to choose a different letter on the sheet.

We left Lenny at the table fiddling feverishly with the rub-off letters that he'd owned for approximately 7 minutes, as the class shuffled inside to get warm.

We all took off our coats and settled in our seats around the large center table. The instructor had just begun to outline the critique process when the door opened and Lenny walked in calmly as if everything was fine and he took his seat.

Note to self: confidence is everything.

One by one each student placed their artworks on the table. There would be a short discussion, the artist would explain the intent and students and instructor would give feedback.

It wasn’t easy. In one embarrassing exchange our instructor demeaned a student’s piece in front of the class, despite the obvious hours spent creating it. It nearly brought the student to tears.

Our class met once a week so it was scheduled to be quite long - two and a half hours. We'd gone through the first 4 pieces, and a few tears, in about 30 minutes.

With two hours to go, it was Lenny's turn.

Lenny fumbled with his backpack. From its depths he pulled at the corner of his thin white paper, but the page appeared to be under tension, like it was crammed between a book and some backpack junk. It thus emerged in slow-motion with a light scraping sound, creasing slightly under the pressure. Finally it snapped from the jaws of his backpack, and immediately Lenny switched gears, as if the whole ungraceful reveal had been intentional. He waved the page into the center of the expansive table with the exquisite flourish and precision of a well-practiced servant setting a dining table for a monarch; even secondarily readjusting its position to align perfectly with the right angles of the table. The pomp of presentation was all he had. He seemed to know it.

There was a moment where the room remained expectant, perhaps he was simply moving things from his backpack to get access to his art piece?

Then he sat back down.

The little page felt small and cheap in the middle of the huge table previously occupied by many large, complicated pieces. In addition to the crease, it still had a wet spot from the picnic table outside. If it hadn't been so perfectly centered and aligned on the table, and you didn't also know for a fact it was supposed to be art, you'd assume it should be thrown away.

Patrick and I sideways glanced at one another through half-lidded eyes. Somehow we both knew it would be bad form to criticize the piece in any way since we were the only two people besides Lenny to know what lead to this. But Lenny was our friend and we didn't want to participate in the humiliation he was about to face. The tension was thick.

Due to its small size, students and instructor had to stand and crane to see the little piece of paper. Patrick and I stood for formality and pretended to consider it thoughtfully, and sat back down, eyeing one another again.

The page had 3 capital Letraset letters on it:

A O V

And nothing else. Three letters. Technically, yes, "a sequence of images". So, box ticked, I guess. But to say this piece looked embarrassingly unconsidered would be an overstatement.

Patrick leaned over and whispered, "This is gunna be brutal."

I nodded, almost wincing. I felt bad for Lenny.

The room was dead silent.

Someone finally spoke.

"What's it mean?"

A few people chuckled at the obviousness of her question.

Without missing a beat Lenny said, "You tell me." his manner confidently coy.

More silence.

Patrick and I sideways glanced once more, here it comes.

"The shapes seem to echo one another." someone said sincerely.

Another person added, "Yes, I thought so too, but the cross on the 'A' breaks it, so it's not... it's not just a reflection."

"It's intriguing. It... it suggests there is meaning.”

Everyone was contributing now.

"Is that because it's letters? I mean it forces you to think about it as a word. ...But it's not a word."

At this point I think my brow furrowed in confusion. Sincere analysis was not what I was expecting.

"What's interesting is that you could ask, 'are these letters, or are these shapes?'" someone else offered.

At this several in the class made sounds of discovery like "oohhh!" and nodded.

"Yes, it looks literal, but the awkward spacing between the symbols abstracts it."

"You know, the opposing points seem to rotate around the center circle..."

And then came the gut punch. Our instructor earnestly offered,

"What happens if you rotate the page upside down?"

Between you and me, I'd love to see a picture of my face right then. No doubt my jaw was slack and I was staring in disbelief. This from the same instructor who just verbally tore an earlier piece to shreds that a different student must have spent weeks to complete.

A couple people reached over the expanse of table to rotate the sad, little, dirty, creased piece of paper.

"Hmmm..." someone said. "Interesting."

Lenny mocked a knowing smile. Both because he was clearly relieved with this energized discussion but also (remember, we knew Lenny) as a performative tactic to appear as though he knew something that no one had figured out yet, some secret key to unlocking the puzzle of his deeply thoughtful "A O V" that the room just wasn't smart enough to decipher.

Several times, in exasperation, students finally asked,

"What does it mean?!"

To which Lenny just smiled and said again, "You need to keep looking".

We did not discuss any more art pieces in class that day. Not one. Incredibly, the entirety of the remaining two hours was devoted solely to debating the vast mystery of profound meaning that was surely contained in Lenny's panicked, last-minute, thoughtless, 12-second art project.

Seriously, dear reader - look in my eyes right now - I'm not exaggerating - 25 people debated this f*ckin' thing for TWO HOURS. I was beside myself. If only they'd seen what we'd seen.

Countless times during the tediousness Patrick and I stared at each other in wide-eyed and stone-faced disbelief. We took deep breaths to relive the stress, shifted our weight again, rolled our eyes at the bloated discussions and tried not to snort or guffaw. There was nothing to say. It was all BS. There was no deep thought displayed on that page, there was no skill of note demonstrated, there was no meaning, there was nothing there except what every child with a pack of stickers had done a thousand times. "Look mama, me stick this here!"

It was meaningless, vapid, and apparently only three of us knew it.

And yet heated discussion ensued as if we were looking at some thoughtful, cogent, challenging work of art.

As I sat there passing time, trying to will this to end, and frankly fill my mind with not shit, I tried to formulate an empirical argument against AOV. I tried to devise a definition of art that would negate whatever this was.

Reflexively, I started by arguing that real art needs to demonstrate some level of skill with one's tools. Effort. Expertise. Attention to detail. Craft. I always preferred art that demonstrated skill in a medium.

I liked that idea. It negated AOV completely.

But as I processed that thought I realized there has been work throughout the ages that is not at all about refinement of technique, beauty or expertise with the medium. Dada artists and other conceptual artists who often found the development and application of skill unnecessary. Pop artists who outsourced the skilled work to others to create visually compelling pieces.

So I changed gears. I argued to myself that maybe to be considered "art" a piece needs to communicate. The creator must have a message, an articulation - a profound, intentional thought. If not communication, what good is art anyway? Art is communication, I decided. I liked this idea too. It still negated AOV and other junk like it because it required the creator to be considerate and know specifically what was being said. It required intention.

But then, among other things, I began to think about the translation of interpretation. I wondered whose job it was to ensure the message is understood, whose job it was to understand. How could everyone understand an abstract message the same way? Is it wrong to have different interpretations? Surely not. In fact that's probably the only certainty we have, that people will have different interpretations. Is it really then the creator's job to know exactly what's being communicated in its entirety to all? Is there no room for the viewer to participate in the message?

I felt the slab of ice under me melting fast. I had little left to hold onto.

Take an ink blot. There is a kind of beauty and very personal message in what one sees in such a thing. Is that subjective experience not a type of art? Or a kind of anti-intentionalism where the piece only derives meaning by the viewer. When I looked at the marbled wall in my Grandmother's kitchen I sometimes saw a raccoon. I couldn't help it. But no one else did. Recently my son said of the Zurich train map that he sees the face of a hippo. I'd never seen that, and now I can't ever unsee it. In a sense that became art only because he saw it.

I wondered how art becomes art then. Does it need an audience? Does it need to be human made? Is it possible that art could be a momentary natural occurrence for just one person? What if I see something mundane, say a hammer on the rack of a hardware store for example, but perhaps the light is hitting it just so that some colors reflect from the metal into my eye and strikes a chord and I marvel for a moment at how unexpectedly profound this image is. Isn't it possible in that moment, even if for me alone, I might feel that this is a kind of personal art in this temporal moment? If I had the wherewithal to take a picture and record it you might see it too and easily agree. But why do I need the picture?

In the end, and countless open-ended scenarios later, I began to accept that one of the few immovable truths is that our notions of art change. That the job of some of history's most important art pieces was to challenge what came before. Not to merely fit in like some repeating pattern over decades. Sometimes art's job is specifically to break those rules. To expand our vocabulary. Make us question art itself. To shock us into seeing and thinking of art differently.

Thus by definition, new art will often seem strange, undefinable, frustrating and novel in some way. By definition it should NOT fit in the boxes we're familiar with. Art should force us to reevaluate what we think art is.

History is absolutely littered with people screeching “That’s not art!” at the origination of virtually every artistic movement humanity has seen. Movements by the way that we have all since come to consider great works of art today. Name an artistic movement, I can guarantee that it was an assault at the time on someone’s sense of artistic integrity and initially denied its namesake.

When art is so undefinable and unpredictable we are left with a definition of art that I have never been able to break since. It's the only definition of art I use today. And it's why I know, without seeing it, that the piece you didn't want to call "art" was art.

Art comes into existence when someone labels it "art".

That's it. If one calls it "art", whatever else it may be... it's art. And in that moment, that someone becomes an artist.

If one calls it "art", whatever else it may be... it's art. And in that moment, that someone becomes an artist.

It's that simple.

If a person sees a piece of chewed gum on the street and says, "this is art". Well ok, now that happened. We can look at the gum and note what we see, try to see what the artist saw, color and form, if they take a picture of the gum, which requires no skill today whatsoever, we can further analyze and discuss it. The photo maybe brings a kind of focus to the subject and suddenly that chewed gum is a kind of celebrated object. A comment on waste or urban life, trash, sustainability, temporary pleasure or whatever. Maybe the art is boring and trite. Maybe it looks like a hippo. I only use this as an example but Lenny’s AOV, specifically created by human hands, and placed before a room of people who found it intriguing, was not even as extreme.

Art is just a label. The moment one assigns this label to something, the artist's work is done.

You may be bristling at this. And if you are, you have some recourse. What you can do is take subjective issue with the quality of one's art.

You might say, "Dammit, that's bad art." You might say, "I'm wholly unimpressed with artists who don't work hard to learn a craft." Or "That art communicates nothing to me."

“A.I. art is the equivalent of drooling in the right direction.”

I’ve said that. But it’s still art.

Personally, I like art that illustrates that the artist tried. I like to see genuine effort. I revere the human struggle. That’s my subjective preference. That preference can be challenged of course, but I will never deny a piece of art its label.

All of these subjective criticisms are valid. These are assertions we can make without reproach.

But the one thing we can't say is, "that's not art."

Because someone said it is.