But is it art?

One of the things I love about the word "art" is that it has several meanings and some of these meanings are quite different from one another and yet the meanings are also simultaneously fused together. For example, one meaning is about creative expression. And another meaning is to do with skill or craft. I think when we talk about art we mostly tend to mean creative expression as opposed to just skill. Of course it's often the case that in order to express yourself creatively you need craft and skill in order to do it well; but you can also be skilled at something even though the something you are doing with that skill has nothing to do with creative expression. The Latin motto you see on the Blackburn Rovers football club badge is Arte et Labore which translates as "By skill and hard work". And if you've seen Blackburn Rovers play recently, you'll know that there's not a lot of creative expression going on.

But back to the first meaning. I think a lot of us feel that there ought to be something more to art than just creative self-expression. We often also insist on art being somehow pleasing to one or more of our senses. (There's a brilliant bit in Episode 2 of Neil MacGregor's History of the World in 100 Objects where David Attenborough is describing an Olduvai stone chopping tool that's more than a million years old and he starts to wonder if whoever made the tool wasn't just making something that was fit for purpose but was also trying to make it look and feel beautiful. And you suddenly get this marvellous sense of how as human beings we have this hunger for creative self-expression even when we're totally stressed out with just surviving.)

I prefer Scott McCloud's definition of art. In the seventh chapter of his book Understanding Comics he defines art as "any human activity which doesn't grow out of either of our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction." So - basically - art is anything we're doing when we're not eating or having sex.

But as McCloud develops his argument he makes a beautiful point. Art may not be necessary (in the same way that survival and reproduction are), but it has important uses. He lists three but my favourite is the third: artistic activity often leads to useful discoveries that make survival easier and reproduction more fun.

How cool is that?