certain anxiety must accompany the need to ask "What is art?" today, as if the questioner were already dreading the response. "Art is whatever artists do," the beleaguered questioner might hear, or "Art is art if it is called art or if it is shown in a gallery or museum." The question: "What is art?" is probably better phrased another way: "What has happened to art?" That is the real question being asked. The art that people of a certain age were exposed to, the paintings and sculpture of antiquity through the Renaissance up to the once avant-garde art of Impressionism and Abstraction, is no longer recognizable in the ropes, threads, tires, machines, neon light panels, lazers, severed cows and whatever else has materialized in installations, earth projects, performances, and various forms of "time" art (video, virtual reality, computer art). Nonetheless, while half the potential art-going world eschews the new, the other half is flocking to museums in record numbers to see it all.

Allow me to resort to an old philosophical trick of defining by negation. "Whatever art was, it's not that anymore."

Can nothing then be said of art, at least the art we now call "contemporary?" If art is everything, or if it can be anything, is it then meaningless? No, it's just not what it was, or at least not what we thought it was. What then of the judging of art? If art can be anything, how are we to know what is good or bad? How, to bring the question closer to home, can one write of art if the boundaries have been suspended and the rules banished? Art may be beyond definition, but anyone with the hubris to publish opinions about it must be operating from some set of assumptions. This is the collision of aesthetics and criticism, the one promisinga set of reasoned guideposts to the understanding of art, the other promising little more than considered opinion based, one can hope, on education, practice, and insight. I may not be able or willing to attempt an answer to "What is art?, " but I should be able to tell you "What is art to me?" and "Why do I like what I like?" But don't hold me to it. One true thing about art is that something can come along that can make you rethink all that you once thought was true.

In attempting some advice to novice artists, Henri Matisse wrote in 1945: "After he has become acquainted with his means of expression, the painter should ask himself, 'What do I want?' and proceed in his researches, both simple and complex, to try to find it." In this one statement, Matisse summarizes much of what can be said of the practice of art in any medium: learn your craft (even if you reject certain principles later on), then proceed to find expression for the ideas or impulses that led you to art in the first place. Thus, central to the quality of an art work is the crucible of the idea: what is the artist trying to say and how does s/he go about saying it? Not to be confused with mid-century conceptualism, which made art of ideas themselves separate from objects, this notion of the idea that propels the art refers to any work which claims to be art. And some ideas are better (or at least to me more interesting) than others. Given the choice between a perfectly executed Norman Rockwell suburban scene and a ponderous Edward Hopper depiction of urban isolation, I'll side with the Hopper; not because I find isolation more appealing than carefree togetherness (see Kerry James Marshall's extraordinarily affecting Rockwellian scenes of African American suburbia) but more that I am drawn to Hopper's complexity and willingness (need, rather) to explore the edges of society. I might make the same comparison with the so-called "Northern Renaissance" painters, van Heemskerck and Duerer. Duerer's abject self portraits attempt a much more complicated self-examination than van Heemskerck's, though neither artist can be faulted for lacking craft.

Closely linked to the idea the artist is trying to communicate (if only to him/ herself) is the intention of the artist to be engaging in a work of art, as opposed to making merchandise or an educational tool or anything else that becomes applied to something other than art. (This raises the historically thorny issue of art vs. craft, to my mind a false distinction. The useful craft object is art if the artist intends it primarily as a work of art which also has function as one of its characteristics.) In regard to intentionality of the artist, I argue for the distinction between "art" and "artful". Advertising, fashion, coffee cups can indeed be artfully conceived and made, but I would not want to call them art. A good example of this difference is found in the early days of video art, a practice which some writers like to trace to groups of "guerrilla videographers," like Raindance, Videofreex, and Ant Farm who created aggressive, alternative types of news reports that have now become mainstream. Artful techniques may indeed have enlivened these reports, but they were not intended as art. Video, as an art, should be distinguished from the uses of video, however artfully executed, in documentaries, news reporting, and other purposeful, that is, applied arenas. Artists seek to create moments of personal expression regardless of practical application.

Artists of every generation are engaged in a battle of wills with those who preceded them. The story of the evolution of art is the story of action and reaction. Artists pose problems for themselves in their striving to follow Matisse's dictum to "Find what you want" as an artist. He went on to say "If he is sensitive no painter can lose the contribution of the preceding generation because it is part of him, despite himself. Yet it is necessary for him to disengage himself in order to produce in his own and freshly inspired."

In this regard, I am most interested in artists who strive for something new, whether that be in the materials they use or the alterations they make in perceptions of reality. This is not to say that newness for newness' sake is a priority to me, but rather that my personal taste veers toward the experimental. As a longtime writer and director for experimental theater and video, I have explored the margins, the fractured languages and images most often associated with the unconscious (though I experience them as part of everyday, waking life). Historically, it's the sidebars that have seized my attention; the avant-garde's, if you will. I still seek them out, convinced that popular culture does not really absorb everything sooner or later. Popular culture is simply not interested in many of the art works that I find compelling, including, for example, the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. As influential a figure as he is, Godard cannot muster enough interest in his work to have his most formally difficult films and videos (for example his ongoing Histoire(s) du cinema) screened for more than a day, if at all, in New York.

Clearly, I do not restrict meaningfulness in art or art itself to the objects of painting or sculpture. Does this mean I disregard these forms? Not at all. In this journal, for one, I have shared my enthusiasm for the paintings of many artists (Rei Nato and Kate Shepherd spring immediately to mind). It is partly due to startling painters like these that I am reminded of the transcendent joy I can feel before a canvas or wall painting. It is precisely because of the limitless sources of beauty (Is this still a defining quality of art? I say yes.) available in painting, sculpture, photography, cinema, and on and on that I have little concern for classifying the form art takes.

What interests me now, frankly, is the aesthetics of the not too distant future when all these questions about the nature of art (questions still determined by language inherited from Aristotle and Kant) will be forever redirected in the face of an art that is not only non-objective, but also spaceless, timeless, and imageless. Computer-based art may still rely on input from more traditional materials (photography, video, graphics) but this will not be the case for long, for inside the computer, issues of light and shadow, perspective, texture, etc. are of little importance. The computer has its own language that artists are just beginning to exploit. We are only at the doorstep of immersive, interactive technologies that will radically transform the experience of art beyond seeing and touching. The words "representation," "simulation," and even "abstraction" will be of mere historical interest when reality itself expands into virtual realms for which we currently have no language. Even the word "virtual" will be found wanting, for it, too, references reality as we know it now. Digital technology is not the end point of technological development; it is just the latest, dominant force. Wait a few years when the very notion of "reality" is in question. Then ask what art is.

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