I wouldn’t call this sort of dance an “art form,” at least not in the same sense as drama, visual art, music, or even dance forms like ballet, because it’s an activity done strictly for the benefit of the participants, not for an audience.
When you compare dance as an art form to drama, visual art, and music, one major disadvantage that dance has is its ephemerality. We can’t experience the work of great dancers throughout history; there hasn’t been a way of saving or recording their work for prosperity. There are no great choreographers of the past that we can study to rival Sophocles and Shakespeare, or Michaelangelo and Rembrandt, or Bach and Beethoven.
And, for whatever reason, dancing seems to be something that hasn’t appealed as much to, or hasn’t been as socially acceptable for, heterosexual men.
Yes, like others, I’d draw a distinction between dance as recreation vs dance as performance. But I definitely rank the latter up there as art, on a par with music, visual arts, literary arts and drama. In fact, I rank some forms of dance above some forms of all of those - A good ballet is way above jazz, for instance, or a decent modern dance piece I find aesthetically way more pleasing than any Beat poet.
I like this question! Thinking about it, I’d rate them:
music > visual art (not photography) > writing > dance > acting
However, if you split composing from musical performance I am screwed. …and in that case, should I lump acting and writing together?! Oh god, this is so difficult.
For me, acting by itself is far and away the least impressive.
If I wished to be polite, I’d give you a similar look and a similar response. I’m glad you found something you enjoy and which adds so much to your life. I don’t “approve” or “disapprove” of your recreational activity. The weirdness for me, and perhaps the people you’re talking to, is that your new passion is something I honestly wouldn’t engage in voluntarily without the promise of a huge amount of money or a gun to my head.
It’s like if someone told me they were really enjoying running marathons, or swimming with sharks, or Mixed Martial Arts. Good for you and all that, but forgive me if I fail to show sufficient enthusiasm.
Your cat isn’t an object of human creation. Art requires that at the very least. It also requires a context for the emotional response.
Humans appear to be pre-programmed to respond to music, and so there’s no doubt that it’s art. But we can narrow our context to be more and more limited–at what point do we no longer call something art? Photography is art… sometimes. What about a photograph with no obvious aesthetic value, but is deeply meaningful to just one person? Is it art because it conveys emotion to a human, or not art because the vast majority of people wouldn’t respond to it? What exactly is it that makes one photo art and another just a visual recording?
Either we accept that there can be individual definitions of art, or that there’s some kind of cutoff, or we just accept that everything human-created is at least potentially art. I’m not in love with any of these but the first seems the least egregious.
People have been asking these questions for ages. But IMHO, it’s silly navel-gazing–a way for people to make art more special and profound than it is. Art doesn’t have to be anything more than this:
Did someone create an object so that it can be appreciated on an emotional level…apart from any practical/functional value it may provide? If yes, it’s art. If not, it’s not art. It’s something else.
No, not everything is art. But even if most things could be considered “art” under such a broad definition, so what? It’s not like calling a five-year-old’s crayon masterpiece “art” takes anything away from Da Vinci, Picasso, or Elvis Presley.
Hello Again gave about the perfect definition upthread, without meaning to: art is the product of aesthetics and prowess (skill). Basically the short form of monstro’s just above. I’d disagree with the “primarily” clause in the quote. Artfully-made things can be perfectly functional, indeed can be made for real needs. Easy example: good architecture must be both artistic and wholly functional.
I agree with all that and for the same reasons. My quibble is really just that aesthetic appreciation is highly dependent on the individual. Music is almost universal, so there’s no question about it. The aesthetic impact of dance however doesn’t seem to work on all people, myself included. I don’t know if it’s innate or not but I just don’t have the mental tools to appreciate the aesthetics of dance; it just looks like awkward flopping about to me. I can appreciate the skill in some abstract way, but that’s it.
If we’re going to rate art as “greater” or “lesser”, we have to ask what it’s measuring, and one possibility is to look at the fraction of the population that responds to it. By this standard, dance would appear to be a lesser art than music.
I should be clear that all this is totally orthogonal to liking or not liking something. There’s plenty of art that I intensely dislike–the fact that it provokes such an emotional response means it must be art. But if it provokes no response at all (except perhaps boredom), then I have to wonder.