What is art? Art Is A Verb, at least from the perspective of the artist. But is art also a noun?

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Most people answer these questions with a noun. Art is a painting or a song. Art is a novel or a sculpture. 

A noun is a thing.

A verb is an action.

That distinction may seem trivial, but it raises an interesting question. Is art the thing that remains after creation, or is art the act of creating itself?

Art Happens In The Doing

If art is a verb, then it must occur somewhere.

It’s not in the gallery where the piece sits. Or the bookshelf where the book resides. It’s certainly not on the curated playlist.

The art happens before any of those things exist.

A songwriter wrestles with a melody. A painter studies a canvas. A drummer works on a groove nobody will ever notice.

This part of art is largely invisible.

By the time we encounter a song, the recording sessions are over. By the time we read a book, the revisions have been made. And when we stand in front of a painting, the brushes have been cleaned and put away.

What remains is the result.

Knowledge Is Not Experience

There is no shortage of books about art.

You can study the lives of painters, composers, writers, and filmmakers. You can trace movements through history and learn why one style replaced another. Entire careers have been built around interpreting the work of artists long gone.

What those books cannot do is place you in the room.

They cannot recreate the moment a songwriter abandons a chorus after three days of frustration. Those books cannot show you what it feels like to walk onstage and wonder whether the audience will come with you. They cannot capture the silence that follows when a manuscript returns with another rejection.

Those moments belong to the people who lived them.

That may be why the writings on art that stay with me are from those who have their sleeves rolled up, deep in the. process. They come from artists describing the work from the inside. Not because they are smarter than their critics, but because they stood where the critics could not.

They were there.

The Problem With My Argument 

There is a problem with my argument.

If art is a verb, then it exists in the act of creation. The writer writes. The painter paints. The musician records.

The emphasis is on the doing.

Yet something changes when the work is finished.

A song can be played long after the recording session ends. A reader can open a book years after the writer has moved on to another project. A painting may hang on a wall long after the brushes have been cleaned and put away.

The act creates something with the potential to outlive it.

That does not mean the work will endure. Much of it won’t. Songs disappear. Books go out of print. Websites vanish. Hard drives fail.

Even so, the moment a work is completed, art begins to look like more than an action.

It becomes a thing.

The Cost Of Outcomes

The distinction may explain why artists and audiences often talk about art differently. Perhaps I arrive at these conclusions because I spend far more time making things than consuming them.

The audience encounters the outcome. A song. A book. A painting.

The artist remembers the cost.

The false starts. The revisions. The ideas that led nowhere. The moments of doubt that nearly ended the project before it was finished.

This is one of the themes explored in the book, Art & Fear. The finished work is visible. The struggle required to create it is not.

A listener may spend four minutes with a song. The songwriter may have spent months writing it.

A reader may finish a chapter in ten minutes. The writer may have rewritten it twenty times.

Neither perspective is wrong.

They are simply incomplete on their own.

Perhaps that is why I find it difficult to think of art as only a noun.

The noun is what remains.

The noun is what we buy, collect, study, review, and remember.

But before the noun existed, there was an action.

A risk.

An attempt.

A decision to begin without knowing exactly where the work would lead.

Art may become a noun.

But it begins as a verb.

Can We Help You?

Are you more committed to the outcome, or to the act of creating itself?

Thank you for taking the time to read Art Is A Verb. Your attention is appreciated.

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Thank you for being part of the journey.

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