Good morning, T. E. Sanders here. I wanted to share a little story and talk a bit about something that's been on my mind lately: What is Art?

Some years back, I directed a film where we were shooting a scene in an art gallery. At the time, they only had a couple of pieces out on pedestals with nothing on the walls. I wanted the actors to come up to one of the pieces and strike up a conversation as two strangers. Thing is, the shot didn't look like a gallery because there was only the one piece on the pedestal in the frame. Behind me was a trashcan that had a bunch of Styrofoam laying next to it, probably from some box shipping something fragile. There were white shelves in the background of the shot. We took the styrofoam and broke it into pieces and created random shapes, then stuck them together with toothpicks so they looked like abstract sculptures. We placed them on the shelves in the background, and boom -- the shot suddenly looked more like a gallery.

Now, can we consider those abstract Styrofoam sculptures pieces of art?

Usually, when someone asks "what is art," they're not actually talking about the word -- they're looking at something visual and asking, is THIS art? This talk about the subjective visual aspects of art is the most common surface conversation that comes up. But the real question goes much deeper and that's what this video is for. We won't cover everything and I might get a bit random here and there, but I'm hoping this conversation will help you -- and me -- get ideas on how we can approach getting our heads wrapped around what art even is, especially in a time when someone can talk to their computer and have it print out a copy of a painting in their favorite artist's style, without said artist ever knowing anything about it.

First, let's just talk about the word ART for a minute. There are a lot of uses packed into that word. We'll say things like the "art of living," which implies there's an art form in there somewhere. Or we might say the art of Picasso, which implies the outcome of his process. There is the "Art of War," where strategy becomes art. And we have things like the "liberal arts" and "culinary arts" and "martial arts." It can often be both the discipline AND the things produced by that discipline. Do we think Bruce Lee was an artist in his field? I've always thought of him that way. The varied uses of the word reveal different facets: skill vs. product, technique vs. tradition, practice vs. artifact. I tend to lean into this when I'm thinking of how to apply art to my life, as it speaks to the possibility of living intentionally as a form of art.

Then there's the history of the word itself. In the original Latin, "art" was ars, which meant any skill or craft. Eventually, the word narrowed from "any skill" to "creative expression" -- and this only happened relatively recently, around the 18th to 19th century. I don't know the reason for the shift, but it explains why we still have vestigial uses like "the art of living." I like both meanings and use them interchangeably.

But here's where many of us, including me, may have missed a few things -- though I did eventually get it after years of being active in the field: there's more to art than just the output. I like to think of a complex topic like this as having many points of meaning across a gradient. So, at least for the purpose of this channel, the ONE meaning for art that stands out among the many centers around creative intention, and I think it's an important one.

When I apply my creative focus toward something, I think of myself as engaging in an artistic pursuit. It could be painting a picture, or making myself some special dinner, or even something left-field like bio-hacking. The bottom line for me is I'm using that part of myself that someone might call "talent." I do call it that myself, but when I say that word, I'm talking more about an ease, or aptitude toward being creative during thinking and execution -- the whole process -- creativity with intention.

A lot of the execution for some artistic output is often done in the head before the hands even get involved, and there is an art to that. It could be the years put into a craft, or it could be the hours put into thinking about something you want to do, consciously or subconsciously. Anyway, we often only think of the output as art, but the word for me encompasses not just the output, but the input as well.

This, by the way, might be one reason we can look at a urinal and say it's a piece of art. My default is not to subjectively think a urinal is a piece of art, but when viewed through the lens I've presented so far, you can see how the work of Duchamp could be considered art. If you consider the word "art" as a gradient of meanings that, when taken together, creates a larger meaning, then you can see why someone could call two colored squares of paint on a canvas a piece of art.

So -- remember those Styrofoam sculptures from the beginning? My intention was not to create works of art to share with others. My intention was to create a shot that looked the way I wanted it to look, and that shot was the piece of art for me. But those sculptures were still there when we left. If someone came along later and it spoke to them on some deeper level -- like they really thought, wow, I love this -- it would then become art regardless of the creator's intentions, location, or even if the creator was still alive.

Which brings me to another point along the gradient: the power of story. I think the art critic Jerry Saltz said something like "If I have to know the story behind a piece of art to consider it art, then it's not art." I love Jerry Saltz and I used to agree with him, until I really examined the subject and how I think about my own processes.

You could put the whole story into the frame, of course, but there can be more story outside the frame as well. The art of story can be part of the work without being part of the frame. I use "frame" here to reference what we see when we're looking directly at the thing -- a sculpture, a painting, or even a long line of green paint someone drips between two contested territories to make an artistic point. It's up to the artist how much they want to include in that thing, and how much to leave invisible as a conduit to something else.

And yet another point along the gradient is the internal story of the artist themselves. When I'm in the throes of a given creative piece, I actually feel different. There's something going on emotionally, chemically, energetically, even metaphysically. I feel it all the way down in my core. There's a mental facility that gets engaged that wasn't there before I started, and that spills into the work both inside and outside the frame. This indicates to me that the process is engaging my artistic self -- and using this concept, I can only think of the output as a piece of art no matter what it is, regardless of whether my intention is some transcendent truth or just ornamental.

Notice that so far I've been trying to skirt around the subjective part: is it a good piece of art, or is it crap? That's a deep enough question to require its own video. I've been trying not to base this exploration on whether the thing I'm looking at is any good or not. It's not a "that crap ain't art" just because I happen to not like it.

Up to now, I've mostly examined the question from the perspective of the artist -- their processes and intentions. But there is another partner in this dance. Art is usually created to be experienced, so we have to talk about the dialogue between the creator and the person who experiences the work.

We are perceiving machines -- it's a special feature of human consciousness and makes our experience in this world the rich experience that it is. Art is communication of information between the creator and the receiver, an attempt to transfer perception from one person to another. After that, it's the responsibility of the receiver to define what they've received. If they define it as art, then it is art -- and there is no argument that can be made, as that definition belongs to the receiver.

I find it very interesting how, when you get enough people agreeing that something is art, it becomes more solidly understood as art through shared experience. Imagine if Picasso had only created a few pieces, and he was the only one who liked them. Yeah, they'd be "art" to him, but they wouldn't have become part of the cultural consensus. Enough people liked what he was doing that it became part of the fabric of our culture. There are still people who say "that ain't art" when looking at a Picasso, but enough say otherwise to make it part of our shared aesthetic vocabulary.

Anyway, now that my brain has melted -- does all this really just mean that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? As cliche as that might be, I don't know how to argue against it. Your intentions result in art. Someone experiences it and it becomes something to them. When enough people share that experience it can become something transcendent. Maybe it's like this: there are gradients between intention and perception, and somewhere between these, art happens.

One more thing -- and I know you thought I was done. Is art really only the domain of human experience? I recently found out about a bird called a bowerbird. It creates elaborate structures that look like works of art to attract a mate. Another bowerbird looks at that arrangement of colors and sticks and passes a value judgement on the most beautiful one. The concept of beauty is one we think we came up with, but clearly it transcends human experience, and ties back into what we think about art.

Art depends a lot on how you want to think about it -- how you're using your creative self in your life. For me, I find art everywhere, in everything. It really only requires being intentional in your creative processes, whether it be a painting, or how you approach living life overall. Being mindfully creative in how you interact with the world and those around you is an artform unto itself.

I feel like the ideas I've put forward speak to how I feel about these things at the moment. I reserve the right to learn new things and change my mind.

At this point, if someone put a gun to my head and said "give me a one-liner that would fit on a t-shirt," I would have to say: Art is the enemy of delusion.

Until next time, stay saucy, friends.