The desire for beauty stands to art as the desire for righteousness
stands to conduct. People do not feel and act from a desire to feel and
act righteously, but from a hundred different and differently-combined
motives; the desire for righteousness comes in to regulate this feeling
and acting, to subject it all to certain preferences and repugnances
which have become organic, if not in the human being, at least in human
society. Like the desire for righteousness, the desire for beauty is not
a spring of action, but a regulative function; it decides the _how_ of
visible existence; in accordance with deep-seated and barely guessed at
necessities of body and soul, of nerves and perceptions, of brain and
judgments; it says to all visible objects: since you needs must be, you
shall be in _this_ manner, and not in that other. The desire for beauty,
with its more potent negative, the aversion to ugliness, has, like the
sense of right and wrong, the force of a categorical imperative.
Such, to my thinking, is the æsthetic instinct. And I call _Art_
whatever kind of process, intellectual and technical, creates,
incidentally or purposely, visible or audible forms, and creates them
under the regulation of this æsthetic instinct. Art, therefore, is art
whenever any object or any action, or any arrangement, besides being
such as to serve a practical purpose or express an emotion or transfer
a thought, is such also as to afford the _sui generis_ satisfaction
which we denote by the adjective: beautiful.
But, asks the reader, if every human activity resulting in visible or
audible form is to be considered, at least potentially, as art; what
becomes of _art_ as distinguished from _craft_, or rather what is the
difference between what we all mean by art and what we all mean by
_craft_?
To this objection, perfectly justified by the facts of our own day, I
would answer quite simply: There is no necessary or essential
distinction between what we call _art_ and what we call _craft_. It is
a pure accident, and in all probability a temporary one, which has
momentarily separated the two in the last hundred years. Throughout
the previous part of the world's history art and craft have been one
and the same, at the utmost distinguishable only from a different
point of view: _craft_ from the practical side, _art_ from the
contemplative. Every trade concerned with visible or audible objects
or movements has also been an art; and every one of those great
creative activities, for which, in their present isolation, we now
reserve the name of _art_, has also been a craft; has been connected
and replenished with life by the making of things which have a use, or
by the doing of deeds which have a meaning.