Your Mission

On one of my papercraft e-mail lists recently, this suggested activity was posted. 'Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to find a unique piece of art on a blog or website to share with the group.' What an interesting challenge, eh?

Naturally, it sent me on this sideways thought process, as these things often do, probably in a totally different direction than the original intent but this is where it took me.

First, I thought, I have to determine what 'art' is. That one question alone can and has been debated many times before. Here are my thoughts on the subject. I think that a majority of people have a very narrow view of art and only use that word to identify and define items found in galleries and museums. In truth, art is all around us.

For the purpose of this exploration, let's eliminate the art of Mother Nature which is wide and vast. We will concentrate on things made by human beings.

Is music art? What about the furniture in your home? Or the clothes that you wear? How about jewelry, is that art? Or the car that you drive? My answer to all of those questions is YES.

In my humble opinion, anything whose origin is in the mind of a man, woman or child, then created from that vision is 'art'. Is it all 'good' art? Well, like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. And why can't 'art' be functional too?

Most of the items we use in our daily lives are several degrees separated from the personal imagination they came from, made on assembly lines in factories, by nameless, faceless people we will never meet, but does that make them any less a piece of art than the painting in an art gallery?

It's an age old question that many have asked and few have answered to the satisfaction of the rest of us. So, I will leave it with all of you to decide for yourself. What is art and what is not?