It’s really quite simple.
“The World” means your everything. Literally. Your “planet” means just this physical spinning rock but your “world” can mean your community or your whole industry but also everything our species has ever known or will ever know. Lock, stock, and barrel. Ideas, emotions, places, products, your Dad, your Mum, and Benedict Arnold. The baby and the bathwater. Everywhere and anywhere in the Universe. The whole shebang. Obvious maybe? It’s a starting place. It’s the WHERE.
“The Culture” means what you do. This cuts across nations, industries, families. Again, it could just mean what happens in your community or your field but it could be everything humanity has ever done or will ever do. Art is part of culture, but so is religion, history, politics, science, cooking, etc. Some cultures clash. This is why people like Jill Lepore are foolish when they assume something isn’t art because of the culture it came from. The academic grouping called the Humanities basically encompasses the disciplines that study Culture. Cultures are grounded in populations that are grounded in a specific time or its essential qualities, its zeitgeist. All of this can even form the context for the next thing you will do. It’s the WHEN.
“The Arts” means… Art is… Well now, this is where people begin to lose their fucking minds, isn’t it? This is where all the debate lies. This is what gets people rankled and fuming. This is what makes people confused. Some say it’s everything with an aesthetic. Some say it’s everything that has no practical, survival-based purpose. I prefer to think of it something like: creativity acting on the world. Anything that happened or was made or was said when something looked at reality and said “What if?” Small questions and big ones alike. Just as in the scientific definition of work: force exerted on the world, it can happen anywhere at any time to anything. Here’s one of the craziest parts— get ready for this. Part of art is often creating representations of things from the World, or indeed creating entire “Worlds”. That’s what they call WORLDbuilding. So you can have everything else on this list IN this one. So everything else on this list can, contextually, be this one without diluting it. “The Lord of the Rings” is a work of art that contains so many fictional people, works, places, and entire cultures in its fictional world, its diegesis. It has its own who, what, where, when, how, and attempt at a why. The World moves around the Arts and the Arts grow out of the World in an attempt to explain everything. It’s the WHY.
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Scott McCloud’s extremely brilliant and extremely simple definition of art.
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“The Mediums” mean the ongoing set of expectations for the delivery method of your art. Paper or canvas? Will it move or be static? Is there audio? Or are you making art of an idea or a dish of food? Yes, the food you eat and a few other things can straddle the cultural divide between art and practical human life needs. The form it takes matters as it alters the content, and the context, and the feeling. But the form can’t negate the creativity within, to the literal contrary! The imposed limits of each form encourage creativity. The form is just the frame you put something in. This is why people like Bill Maher are plainly wrong when they say something isn’t art because of its medium. Framing, plating, screening, composing, shooting, printing, drawing. It’s the HOW.
“The Genres” mean the ongoing set of expectations for the content of your art. I've heard it said, 'every genre is just an ongoing conversation' but I think it's more like a common framework. Stock characters or archetypes? Common situations or tropes? These aren’t necessarily bad! Artists sometimes just want to say what they need to without getting lost in detail. Settings can change but expectations about them rarely do. A “dock” is different from a “dick”, obviously. But both a “dock” and a “dick” can mean extremely various things in a gangster novel and in a sci-fi novel. This is why people like Martin Scorsese saying something isn’t art because of its genre (or distribution or cost) are flat wrong. Every art medium can have genres: from barbecue to baroque, from Afro-Futurism to constructivism. Everything beyond that is specific to exact works or a series of works or franchises, you can do almost any story within each genre. It’s the WHAT.
I’m not some super-genius. I’m not infallible. But I have been thinking about this, writing about this, and arguing about this for twenty years. I might change this with time, ain’t nothing written in stone. Argue with me about it, anywhere and everywhere. We each get to live in this crazy, huge, potentially never-ending World, with its Culture of Works in Genres & Mediums in the Arts. Everyone who has ever existed are all in this equation. You are the WHO.
So don’t judge other people’s stories, just take them as they come. Don’t be an ivory tower art snob or a couch potato entertainment junkie, wait for the thing to say what it has to say. It’s not hard. What’s harder is making the stories. You need a how, a who, a where, a what, a when, and somehow, someway we come closer to discovering a why. That’s what art is and what it’s for.
~ @JonGorga
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