Ars gratia artis

What is art?

According to Wikipedia: Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics, and even disciplines such as history and psychology analyze its relationship with humans and generations.

For me, it has an even simpler definition: Art is what gives you satisfaction.

By satisfaction, I don’t mean the feeling we get when someone lands rather uneasily on their base when you pull the chair away.

I mean the satisfaction of a job well done.

Even when no one’s watching.

The satisfaction of a painting well painted, of a raga well sung, of a taal well played, of a particular sur well articulated. Don’t we see a singer smiling at herself at a particular note? Don’t we find an instrumentalist stealing a smile when he plays a piece rather well?

But, why limit ‘art’ only to creative fields?

Painting a wall or plumbing or fitting shelves can also be art. So can be washing, ironing, polishing shoes or cutting vegetables. The thousand mundane things we do around the house can also transcend their monotonousness to be ‘art’, only if we continuously try to improve ourselves at it.

It might even mean making a rounder wheel.

But for anything to be ‘art’, first you need deep knowledge of the task you perform. By experimenting with this knowledge you have acquired from outside, can satisfaction be achieved. Find out for yourself, with the help of your direct experience. Finally, you will come to a conclusive and fruitful stage of knowledge. All knowing is in vain if it is not direct. Indirect knowledge is, of course, informative but never fulfilling. All artists throughout history have gone through great pains in order to know their craft more intimately. They were not satisfied with the experience of others. They were not frightened off from this quest by the defenders of orthodoxy and dogma, who persecuted and sometimes even executed them because their conclusions were different

One of my very good friends derives great satisfaction from improving processes and creating better supply chains. So do I, as a Consultant, from making my employer’s clients aware of their technical needs (or ‘requirements’ as we like to call it) rather than just catering to their wants.

Of the hundreds of hours I have spent observing people, I have discovered quite a few artists.

How many times do we appreciate the neat stacks of apparel when we carelessly pull the fifth one from bottom and let the others fall in a heap and never replace them as before?

There is this assistant at a mall I had seen folding T-shirts and putting them back to the rack. It is a simple task and, definitely, a thankless one. His deftness and speed was amazing; I hadn’t seen this happening at any of the 15-20 odd malls I visited so far. And after every shirt was folded, he patted it affectionately, as a mother would pat her baby and place it gently over a pile which was rising in perfect formation like a multi-storey building. When I complimented him, he smiled sheepishly and said he had no idea he was being watched. On further prodding, he quite modestly confessed that he had, indeed, invented the technique and was the result of about twelve months of trial-and-error. One earlier technique was faster at folding but it required him to place the shirt of a flat surface (which wasn’t always readily available in the dynamic environment of the mall) and was discarded. So was another one which was good at making a pile of folded ones but the formation was not quite as he would like it. So was one more which was fast at both but required him to bend twice in the small inter-rack space (which he could not during crowded hours). This was definitely a process improvement, did he not bring this to the notice of his superiors? He said he had tried but they did not care much about it. Also, his colleagues thought he was being flashy just to get noticed. I asked did that deter him from improving his technique. He replied they (his colleagues) can keep their opinion while he continues at it. He even showed me a fold-and-throw method by which T-shirts fell in a perfect spiral in a very short time; he had developed this specially for ‘islands’, a non-rack arrangement where clothes (generally discounted ones) are arranged in an open space on a (generally round) platform for better access to from all sides.

Here is a semi-literate average guy who is an 'artist' in my eyes.