Defining Art

The blog over at Red Hen Press has an interesting post today from Brendan Constantine: Your Cheatin' Art. Sparked by a comment from a review of the movie The Road, Constantine examines how we form our ideas of what is art and what isn't.

Here's the excerpt that interests me the most:

Rather, if you are like many who believe that art is a field of study like medicine in which all efforts represent a movement toward a heightened understanding, toward a cause or cure for consciousness, then it may be necessary to assign values of legitimacy. Perhaps only in my opinion, art doesn’t ‘evolve’ in a single direction, its movements are not only progressive, but regressive and sometimes it doesn’t move at all, thus it perpetuates itself.

Constantine goes on to discuss the idea of an artist being "credentialed," a word that causes a shiver of unease to run up my spine, even thought I went the MFA route. The beginning of the blog promises more to come in the next few days, and I plan to follow the conversation down whatever winding path it leads.