What is art? It’s a question that resists easy answers, in large part I think because it’s beyond us to ever fully answer. Art is something we do after the image of God, because he who is Creator made us (to use Tolkien’s term) sub-creators in his image; art then is something which partakes in some way of the nature of God, and so I suspect that just as we will never be able to fully define God, so we will never be able to fully define art. But then, what is a definition? It’s an attempt to constrain something, to confine it to a purely rational and intelligible space so that we can say confidently that we know what it is, and thus have some control over it. For most things, that’s good, because most concrete things and most concepts are small enough to be defined; but God isn’t. We shouldn’t seek to define God, because if we could define him, he’d be too small to be God. By analogy, I wonder if we should really want to define art. If it were that small, would it be worth pursuing? Rather, just as God calls us to know him not by definition but by recognition—”My sheep know my voice”—so too I think understanding art is a matter of learning to recognize it when we see it.
That does still raise the question, though: what are we looking for? Is art a matter of great skill and technique—is it something that can be graded empirically? I don’t think so; skill and technique unquestionably have their part to play, but art is bigger than mere virtuosity. Art, I believe, is akin to priestly ministry, and the work of the artist is somewhat like that of the priest, in that art is an act of mediation. Much as the great Episcopalian preacher Phillips Brooks described preaching as “the communication of truth through personality,” I would argue that the artist mediates a vision of reality through their personality, gifts, and chosen medium, to give that vision a particular expressive form which can be intuitively and sympathetically apprehended by an audience. That vision doesn’t necessarily need to be objectively correct in order for the result to be art, just as one doesn’t necessarily need to worship the true God in order to be a priest; I do think it helps, though, and that a truer vision makes greater art, just as better skill and technique makes greater art.