What is Art? An NFT approach Part 1

There is no doubt art exists, it is felt, seen, made and admired. But when it comes to defining something as art people tend to have different opinions and points of view which makes it hard to interpret.

Who decides if a picture is considered artistic? Who decides if a painting qualifies as art? It all depends on the emotions of the audience.

Let’s take a look a the Stary Night from Vincent Van Gogh.

This painting was made in 1888 by a mad genius. A painter who is considered as one of the greatest of his generation (impressionism). It is a representation of the Saint Paule de Mausole monastery and its village.

This painting was criticized at first by specialists of the time judging the style to be rough and not precise enough. But other people started to understand the meaning behind the work and realized that this association of colors with the waves in the sky is actually a way for the painters to exteriorize his craziness.

When an artist creates art, it is rarely liked by everyone, but rather depends on what they feel once confronted with the creation. This makes art as a whole so hard to master and at times be understood.

Defining art is not straightforward, however, we can all agree that art happens with the action of creating and is therefore intertwined with the meaning of creation.

Tackling a subject such as creation is difficult, it is still today hard to know if it acts on its own, or if it needs a body to express itself?

1800 years ago Plotinus mentioned how the before and after of the expression of an emanation is complicated to discern, the process of creation has no chronological succession but rather represents a combination of body, soul, and intellect occurring suddenly at a time T. It is therefore impossible to speak of creation without there being an intention to create and a creator.

This idea may seem completely contradictory from a scientific point of view knowing that billions of years happened before a potential creator was born. Is creation then born with life? Finding an answer might take ages however we believe creation and therefore art is only recognized if life exists.

So far, we understand that art is intimately linked with life and creation. Art needs conscious beings to be created, more specifically humans

20 000 years ago people were already expressing their emotions with the tools they had at that time.

Since then humans have never stopped evolving, always striving to discover more, invent more, create more. Faithful to its only friend, art has followed the human along the way and has never stopped transforming since.

We are today at the dawn of a new transition in the art industry, people now have the opportunity to digitalize their work and make it instantly available to the world.

This transition brings problems of ownership to creators who do not fully own their work. We have access to technology that both baffles us and accentuates us at the same time. This is why the need for more nuanced solutions to our aesthetic and business needs are needed now more than ever.

Fortunately, the recent emergence of decentralized technologies has opened a new era of possibilities for artists, allowing them to fully own and distribute their art…

To be continued in part 2.