Probably 20 years ago, driving home from work, listening as I recall to an NPR broadcast from the Washington Press Club, perhaps in a speech of a director or administrator of some arts organization (I wish I could find credit), I heard a definition of art that I have carried with me ever since and passed along as often as I could to my students:
Art is that which rewards continued attention.
I’ve refined the definition (and perhaps complicated it a bit), but retained the gist:
Art is that human communication which rewards continued attention.
To explicate: Art (the subject) is that (existential verb and relative pronoun) human communication (for the sake of definition, art should be human creation and interaction, not nature (though that can be nice too, in its own way)) which rewards (relative pronoun and a wonderfully pregnant verb that takes in all kinds of positive response, from information to insight to pleasure to shock to humor) continued attention (it might be lingering in front of a painting, re-reading a passage in a poem or essay, or coming back, maybe again and again, over years to a work, to get something more from the experience). What I like about the definition is that it excludes the ephemeral, the momentary, the soon forgotten. The pleasure of art is in the contemplation, whether over minutes or over years, the expansion of meaning, the layering of understanding, the slow movement to what it means to be human.
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