After returning home, there was a new email "Is it art?" from The Painter's Keys. When questioned by a reader as to the validity of a work of art included in a previous newsletter, Sara Genn wrote:

"Art's very design is to shapeshift . . . 'Art' is a placeholder word for the plumbing of infinity. Like an imploding black hole, like the trick-winks of a million-year-old star, like the ever-building fecundity of the soil in your compost bin, or a wilting-by-the-minute blossom, or a cloud; it moves through space and time as a discovery of temporal aliveness; discovered, over and over as if forgotten the day before. It owes no explanation. It's existence is its only meaning. It is both as familiar as memory and as new as invention. As artists, if we knew what it was, if we could measure it, there would be nothing left to make."

What art is or is not is the topic of a new book "How Art Works" by Ellen Winner. She also writes that art cannot be defined. It is an open concept and ultimately an infinite game; if one were to list the features of art this would close the concept and end the game. And because art is a socially constructed idea, the parameters of what we think art is are constantly changing.

There are some observations that can be made about art, however. For one, research has shown that even non-art people can tell the difference between abstract paintings made by artists and those made by children and animals. So no, your child could not make a Jackson Pollack. Placing misleading labels on the works of art did not impair the ability of a majority of people to discern the difference. The reason? Most likely because works of art are things made intentionally. We have the ability to perceive greater intent in works by artists than in superficially similar works by children and animals. The latter may be spontaneous and engaging, but artists' works show intent.

"Anything can be treated as art or not. And when we treat something as art, we attend to it in a special way - for example, noting its surface formal features and its nonliteral expressive features as part of the many meanings of the work. Maybe we can't define art, but we can specify what it means to adopt an aesthetic attitude. And while elephants and chimps may make 'art,' and while birds may make 'music,' I am confident that humans are the only creatures who step back from something they are making to decide how it looks or sounds and how it should be altered - in short, to adopt that aesthetic attitude."

(Ellen Winner)

I can't help but think about bowerbirds after reading Winner's comment that humans are the only ones who step back from something they are making to assess the visual qualities. Noah Strycker contradicts this in "The Thing With Feathers" and the chapter on bowerbirds is even titled "The Aesthetics of Bowerbird Seduction."

These birds construct elaborate structures decorated with found objects as part of their mating ritual. Each species has its own taste and style but that doesn't limit the birds from incorporating new objects. In one study it was discovered that the males who were the most successful in attracting females had created bowers with "the most regular geometry, best forced perspective, and deepest visual illusions". The females could evidently distinguish between visual patterns of varying quality.

This is how Strycker described his encounter with a bowerbird: "He first checked over the piles of loose objects, which must have been selected and gathered with care from the surrounding bush. Head cocked, he stepped around the stones and leaves to admire his creation from various angles, occasionally darting in to nudge one of the objects with his beak like a painter correcting some tiny mistake."

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