Of art and nature

Everything can be art.

It's not really uncommon for us to see things like "art of cooking", "art of driving", "art of seduction", "art of war", "art of politics". Pay attention to it and you'll see every area of human expression can be labeled as art. And that's what I think of what art is, any means of human beings expressing themselves. It's leaving the marks of your existence, of what you are, what you see and what you think of the world.
It's the attempt to silence the fear of being forgotten, of being left in the Unexistence.

And then I started to realize... we don't usually see nature as art. We may spend our lifes enjoying the view of mountainscapes and majestic trees and colorful flowerings, but all we usually see of actual art in nature is in a manner connected to the hands of man. You don't see a forest as art, despite how it moves your feelings when you're walking inside one. However, when you walk through a paved path sided by cypresses, you are seeing humans expressing themselves through nature. Maybe you are reading a poetry describing a vicious sea storm, or watching a painting of a cold, silent lake in a winter night, and the art you are seeing there doesn't have much to do with nature itself as with the artist and the viewer, the human beings touched somehow by that scenario.
So, you ask, if any form of human expression is art, then even youtube commenters are making art? Eh, you're the one to judge. I, for one, don't really like most modern visual arts too.

In my opinion, what makes all these forms of self-expression become art is a matter of mastering them. And that's one thing that no postmodernist questioning is going to change. I don't care if my view is so totally outdated, that's something I can't help. I don't think that playing with words as if they were a perfect extension of one's mind, or taking the simplest musical notes and make them become truly alive, or being able to create believable imagery with the fewest pencil strokes is something that could ever become outdated.


Sure, everybody can be an artist. One can go deeper into the discussion and say that not being able to express yourself properly is a very common display of the human existence as well. And, damn, I can't really say you're wrong (these haunting paradoxal things are chasing me lately, aren't they). I, who still have my sentences meeting frustrating dead-ends, who play musical notes as inexpressive as a scratching nail, who strike the paper with the innacuracy of a drunkard, could call the right to be an artist.
But I praise them true artmasters.