The Beautiful, Bountiful, Burrow.

We often seek to define "The Artist." Because art is a personal craft, filled with humanity, the definition changes from day to day and person to person. Here is mine.

I sat in a car a week or so ago. It sped down the road, trees flying by. The sun had just fallen behind the tree line, wrapping a pink and orange glow about their leaves. I could only think of how beautiful they were. How much unimaginable, inexplicable, undeniable beauty sits waiting to be found all throughout the world. An artist finds that beauty and strikes it to canvas or stone or wood or plastic or film. An artist captures the beauty that fills the world. He (or she) may re-imagine it or refine it into a new and wonderful form. But he (or she) still captures the essence of that beauty.

By beauty, I don't necessarily mean the conventionally beautiful. Beauty can be perfect, or imperfect; disturbing or comforting; warm or harsh; crisp or blurred. It is nearly the most undefinable word, second only to art. The two, however, seem to go hand in hand. So, then to know what art is, one must also understand beauty. But beauty is everything. The most grotesque, monstrous, twisted and mangled thing can be simply beautiful. A new born child or a dying old woman are beautiful. Beauty rages within the warmest summer day, and the most terrible hurricane. All the world sits full to the brim with beauty.

But, you may say,

"Those things hold beauty, but they are not beauty"

to which I would reply,

"but what are you?"

and perhaps you would play along and say,

"a human"

"what is a human?"

"I am"

And then we find ourselves back where we started.

But if an artist creates art, which is inherently a reflection of beauty, and beauty is everything, then art is everything. Perhaps, the fault does not lie with beauty or art for being defined so openly, but instead it rests upon the very concept of understanding.

In quantum physics, an observer can never know the velocity and position of a particle to an extreme certainty. As the observer detects the velocity of the particle with increasing accuracy, he (or she) detects the position of it with decreasing accuracy. Rather than the particle's instantaneous velocity and position being fixed numbers as we are used to, they become complex equations whose parts are defined by more equations. Perhaps the same can be said for art and beauty. Rather than exhibiting unique, predictable attributes, they are equations whose definitions only bread more equations, more ideas of what they could be. And so, the definition presents more questions than the word. One could go on infinitely, defining word after word, searching for a way to describe beauty, but they would never find an end. But, perhaps the purpose of a word is just that; the expression of inexpressible things. That is beautiful.

This definition is very obviously skewed by a world in which a toilet or a silkscreen of Campbell's Soup or a piece of wood found in some dumpster can be labeled as art. Such a word both terrifies and intrigues me. These works, or perhaps I should say things, inspire people to question and imagine and rethink the whole world. But at the same time, they equalize the world. They take a specific craft and shape it into a wider venue. At some point, perhaps even now, anything is art, so long as someone calls it so. And as that vagueness to the word "art" grows, the vagueness of other words will also. Perhaps someday everything will become so construed, and so undefined that everything will be the same, because it will be everything. Though I may work hard or make work of worth -

but then you could say

"but what is worth?"

and I would say

"worth is whatever someone wants"

to which you could reply,

"But then, if everything has someone to want it, doesn't everything have worth"

And then we are back again to where we started; unsure of what is and what isn't; what can and what can't. I suppose we can only conclude that the whole world can be whatever it wants, just as it can be whatever I want because there is no absolute frame of reference. All are equal, important and unique. But then, it would seem that none of them are. That is the problem. But that is also, the point.