Michael Mitchell: Archive

The word "art", in this context, refers to all works of art. Every single work of art -- past, present, future -- is a "selective recreation of reality". A drawing, painting, photo of a tree, for instance, is NOT a tree. It's a representation of the image of a tree. The reality is the tree. The representation, the recreation of something real in a different form, is art, but only if the creator alters his or her idea or image of the reality it's based on, if he or she represents reality, not as he or she thinks it is, but as he or she thinks it could be and should be. In other words, every work of art is a recreation of reality, but every recreation of reality is not a work of art.

All art -- the content, not a work of art itself -- is fictional. It's an artist's imagination made real, concrete, in a form that's intended to be perceived, i. e., made available to human senses in a medium designed to symbolize, embody, represent (and therefore communicate, of course) his or her ideal view of reality, specifically the subject of the art work, what the artist thinks is important enough to express, to immortalize, essentially, but it, the content, nonetheless, remains unreal.

So why? What's the purpose of creating a work of art?