... Wouldn't you agree? Doesn't matter if you're thinking of your favorite TV show, that album you've listened to twenty times on repeat, the theater play that made you puzzled afterwards or that painting that filled you with awe. While I also completely agree with this interpretation of the phrase, there is another meaning I would like to endorse, which might be a bit more technical and maybe also controversial at that.
Art is phenomenal in the same way all of our experiences are phenomenal. A piece of art is something we become aware off through our senses, something we can think and ponder about. I want to postulate that this is exactly the purpose of art, to be experienced.
This text is supposed to be a personal manifesto about my understanding of art and the art I want to create. I would be shocked if you wouldn't find many of these ideas better expressed by more knowledgable authors and I apologize that I won't be able to point you to much of the relevant literature. I hope this will change in the future; the plan is to continually update this document.
... everything which purpose it is to be experienced.
A painting is supposed to be seen, a poem is supposed to be heard or read and the same is true for a novel. Music is supposed to be heard and felt. Like every experience, a piece of art starts with sense perception, but goes beyond. We can get an earworm from a catchy song, we can think about what that painting should represent, how it fits into the life and circumstances of the artist.
Like the sound of a tree falling in the woods, there is no art where there is nobody to experience it. But while the tree still produces waves of air pressure irrespective of someone being there to perceive them as sound or not, art wholly depends on there being someone to experience it as art, even if it is only the creator themself. In constrast to 'sound' and 'sound waves', its physical form cannot be cleanly detached from the art.
At this point, you probably already thought of various counter-examples of things that we colloquially don't think of as art, that would be included under this definition. I want to come back to those in a second, but first I want to elaborate a bit on this definition.
It certainly is a very broad definition, but I see that not as a bug but a feature. It reframes a lot of human activity to be included as an artform, something that is mirrored in our day-to-day language, at least in my native language of German. If something is "eine Kunst für sich", an art in itself, it means it is a hard feat, one that supposedly takes a lot of practice. Literally it means something can stand on its own as a form of art; the idiom can be applied to basically every human activity.
Coming back to our falling tree example; while its sound waves are automatically perceived as sound, in comparison, an observer has to ascribe a certain intentionality to something to perceive it as art. A piece of trash lying next to a garbage bin will not suddenly become art. This leads us to another difficult question, is art in the eye (and experience) of the beholder or in the fingers (and mind) of its creator?
The philosophical study of experience, or phenomena, is called phenomenology and was pioneered in the late 1800s by Edmund Husserl. His aspirations were to develop a first philosophy based on rigorous scientific principles, which would provide the basis for both science and the rest of philosophy.
The methods of phenomenology are based on a specific kind of self-reflection. Now, the target of intentionality for both art and self-reflection are experiences. A self-reflective experience is observational and an experience in itself, while a piece of art is a manipulation of our experience and belongs to the external world. The induced experience can of course become the target of self-reflection.
Maybe you're already seeing what I'm trying to get at. Art, understood as the purposeful manipulation of experiences, may serve as the basis for phenomenological experiments.
Where does all that leave me? What is the art that I want to create? Would my time have been better invested into learning some more painting techniques instead of writing this text?
Maybe, but I think there is value in laying out your ideas this explicitly. It forces oneself to engage them in a different mode. It helps identifying inconsistencies or even find new connections you wouldn't have seen otherwise.
That said, there are a few interesting ends to follow here. One would be to explore and test this definition itself, by finding more and more outlandish examples and counter examples. This sounds like a lot of fun, but it's not necessarily the route I want to go down right now.
Currently I'm more interested in exploring phenomenological experimentation, as a complementary approach to rigorous psychophysics.