That’s right, ladies, gentlemen, and those in between, I, Phelyx, have mustered the testicular fortitude to publicly tackle the perpetual debate of what art is and how to define it. Now, of course, I am writing for my dear friends here at SexyWithin, so there’s clear segue from this subject to one more appropriate for this forum. We’ll get there.

So, what is art? As a visual artist who has done work in the music industry for almost two decades, I feel I am qualified to weigh in on this sensitive subject. I don’t believe any wars have been waged over the question, but I can offer that, historically, lives have been lost and blood has been shed. This is one touchy subject and has been debated, daily, across this spinning sphere for as long as it has been determined that art has value.

Within the last few centuries, the term art has encompassed a variety of creative disciplines and mediums to include visual arts, music and performances. Magicians, sculptors, writers, and essentially everyone else who produces a creative product for a living are all considered artists. Painters and dancers are artists, too. Of course, the more tortured their soul, the more qualified they are. So is art the beautiful byproduct of this horrible condition called human? Not exactly.

Does art have to be beautiful to be art? Well, what is beautiful? I met a stunning woman the other week. Is she art? I have a buddy whose mind is so complex, and whose outlook is so positive that beautiful is the most accurate description. Is he art? What if his name was Arthur? All right, all right, let’s narrow it down by referencing the term “work of art”. If either of these lovelies drew a stick figure on a cocktail napkin, would that be art? My answer: No.

In the 1860s, Claude Monet stirred things up, with a few painter buddies, by launching a new movement in painting called Impressionism (the term was actually derived from his work “Impression Sunrise”). The effect was to leave broad, brightly colored, thick licks of paint across the canvas in what, up close, appeared to art connoisseurs as a chaotic and random mess. Further, these anti-scholar, rogue, Parisian bastards had the audacity to paint their subjects en plein air - in the open air.

It took some time to convince anyone that this controversial style of painting was art. The public squinted their eyes and stood back a few feet, and eventually became quite excited about it. This happened long before the critics accepted it. Critics, historians and laymen in our time universally consider Monet a master painter. What he created was definitely art. Does this mean that if he shit in a jar, that this too would be art? No, but it would still net a hell of a lot on eBay.

Zurich, 1916: A group of kooky artists gave up on our culture, just as many of us are tempted to today. These nuts, however, wrote a manifesto declaring their disgust and their anti-culture, anti-art movement called “Dada.” The evolution of this movement saw public exhibitions of everyday objects, like a wadded sheet of paper, prominently displayed on a marble pedestal. There were endless and nonsensical public “readings” of poetry, mindless demonstrations in cabarets, and the movement spread across the continents, in some competitive pee-pee contest, just like everything else controversially human. Today, but only in retrospect, anti-art, or true Dada is arguably considered art.

More recently, Andy Warhol stirred things up in grand style. The 20th anniversary of his death was last week, and the mere mention of his work still inspires heated debates that are as passionate as in the 1960s. It is commonly known that I am a Warhol historian, or “Warholic,” so I will avoid temptations to go into numbing details, but allow me to define Andy’s work as art.

The controversy surrounding Warhol’s work began in 1962 with the series of paintings of Campbell’s soup cans that were painted in a semi-mechanized process of silk screening, and merely looked like advertisements. The gallery offered these for $100 each and the collection of 32 is valued in the millions today. The gallery across the street retorted with a stack of real soup cans and a sign that stated they could be purchased for a lot less than the hundred dollar price tag there.

Warhol had a statement as an artist, but this is not what made it art. The statement he made was done with a more-than-respectable level of craftsmanship. It was clear that he cared about his statement and about his product. “Craftsmanship” is the very word I use to define art. Craftsmanship is art. We would have never known the name Warhol if he didn’t produce a product that was expertly crafted. The same goes for Monet, and I feel a need to add that the name Hugo Ball, the founder of Dada, is not a household name due to the absolute absence of craftsmanship in his humorously lazy work.

Other uses of the word “art” support this. A few days ago, my best friend and I had a discussion about the phrase “state of the art.” I was struggling to explain that it means the technologically best available, but we got into a debate about the origin of the phrase. I suppose I could just bloody Google it, but where’s the challenge in that? We challenge each other because that’s our thing. 

There’s also the term “con-artist.” This helps me reference craftsmanship again and supports my single-word definition. A con-artist is not producing a product, necessarily, but he must be a true craftsman to maintain his freedom. A con-artist without craftsmanship is an inmate.

Craftsmanship, then, can be applied to anything we do, and most easily to those things about which we are passionate. Therefore, I offer you this: be an artist. In some meaningful way, choose to be an artist. You can be an artist about your family or an artist about your housecleaning (though some call this obsessive-compulsive behavior). You can be an artist at work. You can be an artist in the way you love. Just remember that it only takes passion and craftsmanship to turn a can of condensed soup into a million dollars. 

What can be done if you turn your romantic relationship into a work of art?