Ep. 80: What is Art?

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2021

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Are video games art? What about a urinal? And how about splotches of paint on a wall? We all have instinctive answers to these questions, but it can be hard to articulate the logic behind them. In this episode of Young Heretics, Spencer Klavan discusses one of the West's oldest and most sophisticated books on the topic and how it can help us solve modern problems about censorship and cancel culture.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Today I would like to talk to you about the question, what is art?
0:13.1	I don't think you can ask what is art without saying it in the most pretentious
0:18.4	possible way. So I hope I achieved that goal at least. This is one of those questions that they
0:25.4	ask in like your philosophy 101 class and everyone grows because you're like, oh, I kind of know
0:32.2	it when I see it and I know it's not like, you know, toilet in the middle of a museum, but I also know
0:39.2	that it is like, you know, painting, but what, you know, what is it art? It's really hard to say.
0:45.8	It's been something that vexes people. We know there's something called art in the world
0:51.3	and that it does something to us. I've been talking about it a lot recently on this show, but when
0:56.7	you start to, you know, get around to defining it in pure neat philosophical terms, it can often
1:03.0	elude you. And this is one of the things that our modern taste makers have used to their
1:10.3	advantage. They'll say, well, you can't prove that the urinal isn't art. And then they'll just
1:15.6	put a urinal in a museum and be like, it is art, you know. And this fuzziness around the
1:20.9	edges of the definition has caused us to kind of throw up our hands and just say, like, well,
1:25.0	anything can be art really if, you know, if you choose that, if it's your interpretation, right?
1:30.1	These things are subjective in the sense that they involve personal experience. They involve
1:36.2	people perceiving them and subjects who look at things like art or experience them in other ways.
1:43.9	But they are not arbitrary. We have lost this distinction in our culture between subjective
1:49.0	and arbitrary. The beauty of a sunset is subjective. There's just, you know,
1:56.0	atoms and photons bouncing off of one another in a sunset. There's no such thing as color, except
2:02.0	in human perception. The quality of color is something that we just perceive and perhaps
2:08.0	God also perceives. But that doesn't mean that it's arbitrary. If I say the sunset is green,
2:14.7	when it's actually red, I can be wrong. I'm just wrongly describing a subjective experience.
	...

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