All tools are works of "art"; all works of "art" are tools.

Our position in the history of what art has been thought to be makes it difficult to appreciate
the importance of technology for art, since we are predisposed to believe that to the degree that artifacts are technological they are not art at all. In broader terms, however, technology is
always the more or less immediate background for everything we call art, and from a
historical point of view the link between techne and art cannot be broken. We eliminate fundamentally significant avenues of historical understanding when we separate and oppose them.—David Summers, Real Spaces

Over and over in my years of teaching "art" history, I have heard students say that they don’t know much about "art." My initial response is to ask if they ever go to the movies, or play video games, or surf the Internet. On the first day of classes each semester I conduct an exercise intended to answer the question, "What is 'art'?" I ask the students to name different "art" forms, and I write these on the whiteboard as they call them out. Inevitably the traditional media are the first to be offered: painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture, dance, literature, music. Photography usually pops up pretty early. Some bold students will then begin to suggest such areas as fashion, cooking, graphic design and even tattoos. Movies eventually get recognized, and video games are finally not far behind. It is obvious that the students are initially giving me what they think I want to hear, which is natural, and then as they begin to recognize my openness to media that their generation is more familiar with, they begin to offer these up.

Still, each time I conduct this exercise many vital contemporary media are consistently left off the list. Movies are identified, but rarely television shows. Graphic design, but never web pages (or computers, for that matter). Skateboards and surfboards, but never cars. When I ask whether a car is a work of "art," the frequent response is, "It can be," by which is meant that a car is a work of "art" when an emphasis has been placed on how it looks, on its design elements, over its functional elements. "So a tricked-out Charger is a work of 'art'," I say to them, "but my Corolla is not." This usually draws a laugh or two, along with nods of agreement. (What can I say? As all veteran teachers know, it helps to keep them entertained!) It is usually at this point that I cut to the chase and let them know that all man-made objects are works of "art." Cars and computers and television commercials are usually left off the list because they are technological, and in this culture we generally make a distinction between technology and "art." Here I point their attention to the above quote from "art" historian David Summers which I have included in my syllabus from the very first class I taught. Basically he says you can’t separate technology from "art," not in the pre-modern world, and not now.

 Renaissance painters were the masters of bustling workshops working at the cutting edge of technology. The master and his assistants weren’t called "artists" the way we use the term today but were considered more what we would call craftsmen. And while much of what they created is today found in museums, these objects were originally created for specific spaces with specific functions. A Renaissance altarpiece, for example, was made as a visual aid for a largely illiterate population, and anyway the liturgy was in Latin. As a modern equivalent to the Renaissance altarpiece, I encourage my students to consider the video screen behind the performers at a rock concert or, on a more prosaic level, the PowerPoint presentation I use to present this lecture. Perhaps because painting was the dominant technology in the visual medium for so long, painting is the format most commonly identified with "art" today. But the dominant visual formats today are certainly film, television and "new media" associated with the Internet and related technologies. And, of course, these are often created in bustling workshops using the very latest technology. I remind my students to think of all the names listed in the credits that roll at the end of a movie.

It’s the first day of classes, so I don’t ask them to take too many notes. But this I ask them to write down: All man-made objects are works of "art." All tools are works of "art," and all works of "art" are tools. I tell them that all of the objects we’ll study, from the Law Code of Hammurabi to the Arena Chapel and beyond were first and foremost utilitarian. They were made to serve a particular purpose, and in this way they can be considered tools. Even objects created after the rise of the notion of the "fine arts" in the eighteenth century must, from a historian’s point of view, be evaluated not so much in terms of how they look but how and why they were made. The confusion arises from the historical reality that the discipline of "art" history came into existence placing a strong emphasis on form (or style), and this emphasis continues to influence the practice of "art" history, as well as the popular notion of what "art" is, to the present day. Works of "art" are said to be fundamentally composed of form and content. Form quite simply is the way an object looks. In painting, form refers to color, line, shape, etc. Content may be more accurately referred to as subject matter, but the binary trope of form and content is firmly established in our cultural lexicon. And the popular notion of "art" refers to those objects which are created with an emphasis on form, so that even some paintings (like, perhaps, those of Jim Harrison) are often not considered "art," or at least not "fine art," because the emphasis is on subject matter. But all man-made objects exist on a continuum with form on one end and content on the other, and objects that are pure form or pure content exist, to borrow a phrase from E. H. Gombrich, only in the imagination. 

It must be acknowledged that the rhetorical dichotomy of form and content was conceived with regard to the visual arts, and this dichotomy must be reexamined when we broaden the scope of what we consider "art." Even if the student is not yet ready to accept a pair of channel locks into the domain of "art," she must recognize that museums are filled with utility objects, from suits of armor at the Met to helicopters at MoMA. It may be easy to identify the subject matter of Nighthawks, but what exactly is the subject matter of a suit of armor?

On the continuum of form and content, style is equated with form and subject matter is equated with content. In the all-inclusive definition of "art" we can place design on the side of form, and on the side of content we can place function. The function of a Renaissance altarpiece is to add to the observers’ understanding of the tenets of Christianity, and this is primarily accomplished through subject matter. (Form, of course, can enhance this function.) This approach also allows us to determine the "subject matter" of a "purely formal" work of "art," like the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. There may be no recognizable subject matter in these paintings but, as I remind my students every year, nobody does anything in this world for nothing. These pictures were painted at the very least to decorate a wall. On a potentially more profound level, they were painted to express an idea. And, truth be told, they were also painted to be offered for sale. Each of these things may be what the paintings are about, which is a synonym for subject matter. (When we ask what a movie or a book is about, we mean, "What is the subject matter?")

Now, in the case of the channel locks, it appears that design and function are inextricably bound, that there is no daylight between the two. Channel locks must be designed the way they are in order to function as they and only they do. But what about channel locks with pink grips? What is the function of the pink grips? The pink grips serve to indicate that these channel locks are for the ladies. I ask my students to think about the clothes they wear. What is the function of clothing? The function of clothing is to protect us from the elements and to cover up our private parts. But there are different styles of dress—there are different fashions—and they are not merely decorative. They have a function. The way we dress identifies the subculture we wish to be associated with: businessman, hipster doofus, goth, skater chick. No clothes, no matter how plain, are pure function; and no clothes, no matter how ostentatious, are pure form.

The example I close with is that of the book. Broadly speaking, there are two types of books: nonfiction and fiction. For the sake of argument, let’s narrow it down to the textbook and the novel.  Between the two, the novel is the one more commonly considered "art." The textbook is considered a utility object. The textbook is more concerned with subject matter and the novel is more concerned with form.  The writer of the textbook wishes to impart information in the clearest manner possible, while the novelist may wish to present a more complex narrative and experiment with language. On the continuum of form and function, the textbook typically trends more toward the function end and the novel trends more toward the form end. But even a textbook should be well-written, and the best novels are going to teach us something. And a well-written textbook is better than a bad novel. But better isn't what makes a thing "art." "Art" cannot be synonymous with beauty (good form), because beauty famously resides in the eye of the beholder.  I’m often asked, "When does a thing become 'art'?" The answer is, "The minute it is created."

I place the word "art" in quotation marks because it is a term so broad as to be virtually devoid of meaning. In the classroom, believe it or not, I try not to use the word "art." I prefer to call each medium by its name: painting, filmmaking, mechanical engineering, what have you. I am amused when I visit a bookstore and see sections for literature, history, biography, self-help, and then I see a section for "art." This would be comparable (to channel Gilbert Ryle) to visiting a college campus and seeing buildings for humanities, sciences, journalism, athletics, and then seeing a building marked "university." It’s all the university. And it’s all "art."