> > You know, there's something about this I don't like. It's a niggling little something that always gets at me when I'm listening to this particular argument, and I think I know what it is. This line of thinking seems to mandate allegory as the only valid art: the artist must infuse it with meaning, or it is not art. I don't agree with that.
>
> I don't either. I've used the word "meaning" in this thread reluctantly and used more vague words when I could. I've said art should "convey something," and if that "something" is "meaning," great. But it could also be "beauty" or "perspective" or "feeling." One could argue that these all fall under "meaning," but I'd rather not have to fight over defining "meaning" (which tends to imply that ideas or rational thought is involved) in *addition* to all the other terms in play.

Fair enough. For the remainder of this post, I'll use "meaning" simply for the sake of not changing the term - any of the other terms you gave would work equally well in its stead.

> > And yet, the argument breaks down if that side is removed: if we define art as being something that one can get meaning out of...
>
> That's a logically unsound leap anyway. It's the old "if a then b" does not imply "if b then a" thing. If all art must have meaning, this does not imply that all things with meaning are art.

Except that that isn't what I said in the first place. I was examining two statements involving art having meaning: one saying that the art has meaning because it was put there by the artist, the other saying that art has meaning because it is taken from it by the audience. The former I rejected because it leads to allegory, the second I rejected not because of any sort of converse "all things with meaning must be art," but simply because it's a uselessly vague definition. If we define art as being "something that one can get meaning out of" - not implying any converseness, mind - then we've not defined it at all.

I think the trouble, now that I write it out, is that I was referring to that as the *definition* of art, whereas you were talking about it as a *property* of art. If that is a property of art, as you seem to be implying, then, no, it isn't logical to conclude that all things one can get meaning out of are art. But if art is *defined* as that, as I was saying, then that's not only logical but the whole point of the definition. Consider: if we define a hamburger as being a beef patty placed between two bun halves (no, I don't want to argue about the definition of a hamburger), then anything that is a beef patty between two bun halves is by definition a hamburger.

But that's neither here nor there. My point was simply that to say that art is something one can get meaning out of is no better than to have no definition at all, simply because it's a completely subjective distinction. If what we're looking for is an objective definition of art - and it seems to me that we are - we need some objective criteria with which to evaluate it. And "ability to have meaning taken from it" is not at all objective.