Every human is an artist, just not everyone is aware of this. In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was God. We are the Word. Society as we know it exists because we are sentient and interact with eachother. Humanity is a complex system that constantly evolves. Had the Word not been there, your mind would not have had the liberty to be an individual and survive. We create the Word. The Word creates and shapes our world. When our song dies, so do we. Each of us creates, shapes, by existing.

 

Art is creation, art is communication, art is empathy. Art is a tool for communicating outwardly the invidiual perception of life. Art is life. Life is art. I am an artist therefor I am. The next time you see a drunk man sitting in the tram, yelling incoherent things mixed with a sniff of reality, think about how good a job as a surrealist he may be performing. Try to experience the Art of the New York subway rush hour, or of a mother chasing her child across the supermarket.

 

Some forms of art are easier to recognize than others. Purposefully designed art is an abstraction of every day life. The Grand Soap Opera of the Soul. The traditionally accepted concept of art is the shaping of the art of life with the help of tools into a distinct medium. Art is then the outcome of a distinct wish of the artist to bring the public into awareness of how he experiences this art of life.

 

Tools, I may add, have changed over time. As have the media. The rise of technology, a project of millenia, has shaped the way people expressed themselves. As with all social changes, the last century has shown a great growth there. On the other hand, nothing that has been invented in the last handful of decades has had such a tremendous impact on humanity as earlier breakthroughs, like coming out of the trees, setting things on fire and the writing down about these great accomplishments.

 

Just because we've got entire cities of transistors sitting on a bit of silicon the size of a fingernail doesn't mean that society has advanced as far as it had when people in white dresses started distributing scrolls across the world that told us that we'd better listen to these men in dresses or we would suffer tremendous pains after we were dead.

 

A lot of people, reasoning in hindsight, might want to note that we would have been a lot better off if those people in white dresses had backed off before starting their venture. May I point out to these cynical ladies and gentlemen, that we would then still be banging eachother's heads out with great lumps of rock, having tremendous orgies and overeating? The orgies may not sound so bad, but we were doing a lot better on that department when we were still living in trees, and it were YOUR ancestors that decided it was about time to hop out of them. So don't be so harsh on the religious leaders of the dark ages, they were only following the flow.