What counts as art?

Revised from a college-writing essay I wrote in 2024.

Can you consider anything designed by a human being art? People can argue for and against it, but I don’t think there will ever be an answer everyone agrees on. Art can resonate with people differently. In my opinion, something a person has spent their time and energy making to express feelings and emotions can be considered art. It is everywhere around us.

I would argue that almost anything meaningful to someone can be art. It can take the form of a movie or graffiti. Personally, well-crafted films, music, and drawings resonate with me the most. I fell in love with music when I was young, mostly jazz and rock. I started ballroom dancing before first grade, then dedicated ten years of my life to it until a knee injury forced me to stop. Around that time, I took up other ways of making and enjoying art, including film and playing the guitar.

Art can be a way of telling someone something they have never heard before. A movie can tell a beautiful story or teach you a lesson that no one in your life has managed to put into words. I became interested in film when I was around sixteen, and one of the first films that stayed with me was Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting. It is now one of my favourite movies. It has made me bawl my eyes out repeatedly.

Will is exceptionally smart, but his past makes it difficult for him to pursue his ambitions or trust other people. Professor Gerald Lambeau notices his potential and tries to help him, eventually introducing him to his old friend, the therapist Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams. Sean is grieving his wife, yet he still finds the strength to help someone else.

Sean connected with me on a deeper level as a kind of father figure. What I took from the film was self-acceptance: you can deserve love and a future even when you struggle to believe it. Being talented does not mean you know how to let someone care about you. That part of the story meant more to me than Will’s intelligence.

I watched the film with my family once. My father liked it, but he told me he did not feel a deeper connection with any of the characters. That puzzled me. How could something affect my life so much and leave him with such a different reaction?

It made me realise how personal the experience of art is. We had watched the same scenes and heard the same dialogue. I could explain what the film meant to me, but I could not make him feel what I felt. Something that changes the way one person thinks may not have the same effect on someone else.

That is part of why I find it difficult to draw a strict boundary around art. Some people think first of paintings and objects displayed in museums. I think of the effort someone has made to express something, and of what happens when another person encounters it. A piece does not have to reach everyone in the same way to matter.

For me, art is a way of expressing thoughts and emotions that ordinary conversation sometimes cannot reach. Dancing was one way of doing that. Music and film became others. I do not expect everyone to connect with the same things I do, even my father sitting beside me watching my favourite film.

Revision note: corrected the character’s name to Sean Maguire; Robin Williams is the actor. The original essay consulted Film Obsessive’s discussion of the film and The Communicator’s argument about the definition of art.