This is Nice (And Other Ways Things Become Art)

A friend of mine recently posited the philosophical "What is Art?".

Well, I have a response:

What counts as art? Here’s my map.

Art isn’t only what hands make; it’s what attention declares. You can stumble on a wind-twisted branch, feel that little click of “this matters,” and—without carving a thing—you’ve authored meaning. Recognition is a creative move. Naming is a kind of making.

The long, disciplined road counts too. Thinking about a statue for years. Picking the stone. Changing your mind. Starting over. Placing it in a room. Refusing to show it. Even breaking it and sweeping the chips into a box. Every decision along that path expresses something—about value, about care, about what you refuse to compromise. Expression is the throughline.

And it’s not just the physical. A word chosen over another. A silence held instead of a speech. The story you tell yourself in the car before walking into a hard conversation. A prayer, a joke, a boundary. These are arrangements of feeling and thought—signals you shape and send. That’s art territory.

Does this make everything art? Not quite. The difference is the stance. Most noise stays noise. But when someone—maker or witness—treats a thing as more than utility, as something to be experienced for meaning, we’ve crossed the threshold. You don’t need a gallery or an audience. You need that shift in posture: from “use it” to “listen to it.”

Who decides? Both sides get a vote. The sculptor declares. The passerby declares. Sometimes they agree; sometimes they don’t. The circuit completes when expression meets attention, and what sparks between them is the work.

What about nature? She’s a collaborator. A storm-cloud that stops you mid-step is a site-specific installation you didn’t have to RSVP for. The tide is time-based media. Spring is a slow performance piece with an absurd budget. We don’t create those—fine—but we can still frame them, answer them, bring them into our stack of meanings. That act of reception is its own craft.

If this definition is roomy, that’s on purpose. A narrow door keeps out the people who don’t talk like curators, who don’t have the right shoes or the right stamina. If meaning only counts when sanctioned from above, we’ve confused taste with truth. Let’s not do that. If the doorway is too tight, widen it. If the step is too high, build a ramp. Completion is not just polish; it’s access.

Ethics still matter. Something can be art and also be cruel, exploitative, or harmful. Calling it art isn’t a compliment; it’s a category. We can judge the content without pretending the craft isn’t there. (We should.)

And craft—please—let’s keep that in the conversation. The unglamorous work of choosing a beat to cut so the rest can breathe. Sanding the burrs. Checking your edges. Not because perfection is holy, but because care is legible. Even when you’re “just” noticing a fallen branch, you’re choosing an angle, a distance, a context. Curation is construction.

You already do this, by the way. The way you plate breakfast when you’re trying to make someone feel steadier. The playlist you build for a long drive because two songs in a row will say what a single track can’t. The room you rearrange after a hard week so the light falls where you can actually use it. The sentence you trim before you send it so it lands clean. Daily, ordinary art.

Here’s the small test I use:

Is there an expression—a gesture, selection, arrangement, or response?

Is someone treating it as more than just function—as something to carry meaning? If yes and yes, we’re in the neighborhood.

Value will stay subjective. Good. That means we talk to one another. We explain why this piece saved us and that one didn’t. We argue, change our minds, grow new taste buds. Even the judging is expressive; it tells on our history, our needs, our hopes.

So, what is art, to me? A broad, generous field where making and meeting both count. A place where a person can turn feeling into form—or turn toward a form and let it rearrange their feeling. A choice to pay attention, and the work of shaping that attention into something shareable. Found or fashioned, loud or quiet, single breath or decades-long devotion—if we treat it as meaning, it becomes part of the conversation of being alive.

TL;DR: Art is expression you choose to meet as meaning—sometimes you make it, sometimes you find it, always you decide to listen.