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This is not art. The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is mysterious, but mystery alone is not art.

I have been lambasted frequently on the internet and in glossy exhibition pamphlets for the above, but it is a statement I refuse to either modify or recant. Instead, let me repeat and explain: Painting can never be art.

Never, I realize, is a long way off. However, given that we have roughly 32,000 years of painting to judge, I can safely say that, barring an incredible leap forward in canvas or pigment technology, painting can never be art.

A great many very important people have devoted their lives to claiming that paintings are art, but those people, although well-meaning, are incorrect. Let us start with a definition of art. As there is no one better to define art than an artist, I will use that of Tolstoy, who said “art is a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another.” (Jerrold Levinson, The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Oxford university Press, 2003, p5). We have, of course, many instances of such indirect means of communication we are readily used to: movies, which engage the viewer directly and use that engagement to subtly manipulate the viewer’s expectations of the world; novels, which require that the reader construct, given only a few basic rules and suggestions, an entire universe and use that universe to reinforce or alter our view of the ethical world; and video games, which allow a user to act, to move within a world, learn the rules through trial and error, and build a working method for analyzing and interacting with each other and with the universe. Art may serve the superficial purpose of telling a story, but it also indirectly allows us to become ur-philosphers and scientists, questioning all that we observe. Continue reading →