"What is art?".
Those who wrote treatises on Aesthetics philosophy attempted to answer this question, at least until the end of the last century, until avant-garde art (Cubism, Expressionism etc.), abstract art, the negation of art by the Dadaism movement, canvas slitting and modern art in general made it virtually impossible to come to a classification of art, and especially, to separate art from non-art. Not all art is beautiful like a field in bloom, since some artists depict the anguish and problems of their time with heaps of rubbish, burned plastic, photos of corpses in mass graves. Not all art is easy to understand, unlike artworks of the past like Michelangelo’s David - scribbles, strange noises and walls covered in green-painted pots with holes appear in museums to the eyes of baffled visitors, instead of paintings and statues.
I admit that the standard definition of the dictionary term “art” is restrictive, therefore also inexact, but this does not mean, in my opinion, that art is everything and nothing at the same time, that nothing can be defined art and that everything is art, because in this way we abandon the pursuit of aesthetics right from the start, and we are left to trust what our neighbour tells us, the value of artworks at auctions, not to mention our drawing professor suffering from a nervous breakdown. What we do know is that ancient paintings and statues are certainly art, that it is no longer fashionable to make them in the same way and that on the other hand, if you invent something, it will not be considered anything special, not at least until after you are dead.

Contemporary art, as well as existing, is produced by many people, and is not that different from ancient art, in that art is a human product for humans. As in the different eras and societies, art was combined to religion, to everyday life, to power, etcetera.
Art, as distinct from technique, is defined as an activity linked to the attempt to attain something beautiful, complete, full of meaning and holding its own purpose; we note that art can even influence social behaviour, because it gives us models and symbols that represent the style of an era.
One cannot call certain colours, certain shapes or sounds, art. For example, green is not art, but strokes of green in a painting are artistic in that they are arranged according to the painter’s intuition.
Upon seeing something beautiful, one often tries to find the reason for this beauty in its external features, considering certain colours beautiful and others ugly, but this is a mistake. We are also mistaken in thinking that we can simply make art by using the same violin as Paganini, or Dante’s pen, or Leonardo’s paint and brushes: art lies in how these tools are used, not in the tools themselves.
Neither can one consider art the totality of useless objects and as not having references in the real world. The fact that art is not a moral act simply means that art can be a portrait of Hitler, a pornographic movie or a black mass in the name of Satan, if the result is of formidable expressive might and the execution masterly; in the same way, it is inappropriate to consider many mediocre works art, despite the fact that they represent what is good, or that they are useful or that they are not created with a practical purpose in mind. If life’s events have brought a great artist to hold ideals that we believe are wrong, no-one stops us from condemning him/her morally and from considering his/her artwork as being repugnant, in the same way as no-one stops us from having a special admiration for works that depict our own ideals; so long as there is a clear distinction between art and morals, at least on a philosophical level, and that we realise that when judging anything, including art, our moral convictions lead us to devalue what we are adverse to and overvalue what we support, and our final judgement is more moral than aesthetic.

Art is not, in any case, a feeling in its immediacy. A poet describing a tragic scene or a painter painting it, does not rave deliriously, his/her face does not freeze, he/she doesn’t cry, rather he/she harmoniously expresses those emotions, diminishing his/her own emotions in order to express him/herself as precisely and universally as possible.

The distinction between expression and communication is difficult to draw because the two moments usually follow each other closely and seem joined.
If painters were just combiners of light and colour, seekers of novelty and effects, they would be technical inventors and not artists.
The task of communication, that is, of the preservation and popularisation of artistic images, guided by technique, produces the so-called “artistic” material objects and “works of art”: paintings, sculptures, buildings, writing, musical scores, CDs, cassettes, videocassettes and so on.
“Natural beauty” has an emotional effect on people: it is not art, but the artist can take advantage of it to understand the cause of this effect and to reproduce this cause in a work of art, with the aim of communicating something.
The content may please us because of the subject’s morality, or its precision and realism; the form may please us because of its harmony, symmetry and so on.
Content and form can be separated, but cannot separately qualify as being artistic, since only their relationship and interaction are artistic.
Emotion without an image is blind, an image without emotion is empty.
Each work of art must be loved for what it is, holding inside its full, original and irreplaceable value.
Fabio Ciucci - ciucci.com
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