What Makes Something Art?

Or is the better question: What makes someone an artist?

The Watts Towers by Simon Rodia

I often hear people debating whether or not something should be considered art. Can it be art if it looks like a five year old made it? Can it be art if it's spectacularly offensive? What if it challenges no one? Or if it's an NFT?

These are worthy conversations to have, but I think the far more interesting question to ask ourselves is: what makes an artist?

To my mind, every artist is the inventor of their own nontheistic religion—a way to frame the world for themself and help them grapple with their place in the larger order (and, in so doing, help us grapple with our place too). An artist creates their own mythologies, ethics, and systems of belief, which all manifest in their practice. You can learn everything you need to know about an artist's worldview by investigating the ways they work.

For these reasons, some people who make art objects are not artists. And some artists go their entire lives without producing a single piece of "art."

Growing up, my mailman's name was Joe. He was sweet and avuncular, with an easy smile for everyone. Whenever I heard his mail truck rumble up the driveway, I ran out the front door so that I could hop into his cab to give him a hug (it was the 80s and mail trucks didn't have doors). Every Halloween, he left candy for me in the mailbox. During the spring of my senior year, as replies started trickling in from the colleges I applied to, he would call the house at 7:30am when he arrived at the post office. "I have an envelope here from _______ University with your name on it," he would say. "And it's thick. I didn't want you to have to go through the whole day at school without knowing." For years, I thought I was special—the only kid on his route to receive such attention (forgive me, I'm an only child)—only to discover, later, that he did this for all of us.

When Joe retired, I was already living on my own across the country. I heard that on his last day, parents and kids lined his entire route with signs and balloons, standing on the street so they could wave to him as he made his last round of deliveries. They did this because he wasn't just a mailman. He was an artist.

I would argue that artists seek connection and meaning above all things. They are generous with their gifts—even in protest, indignance, or rejection of the status quo—which makes both the gifts and the artist expansive by nature. This is why some self-professed artists are not artists at all, and why some mail carriers are.

Somewhat counterintuitively, by letting go of the question about what makes something art, we’ll find that we have a much easier time answering it. If I'm ever on the fence, I disregard the object entirely and simply look to the person who made it. For me, at least, it's less about the object itself than it is about the organizing principle that brought the object into the world. And the only way to discover that is to learn about the artist’s approach to life, to their work, to the world. To appreciate their singular religion.

This is how it’s possible for two people to create the exact same object and for only one of those objects to be a piece of art. It’s also why the work of certain activists, scientists, laborers, and the mere presence of certain people can have such a profound affect on our ways of seeing the world and our desire to re-imagine a more meaningful one.

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