Do you, dear blog readers, make art when you create? Or do you consider your creative pursuits “crafts,” not “art”?

Do you engage in both art and craft, but as separate endeavors or projects? Or are both art and craft present in each and every project you do?

Do you consider yourself a “quilter” or “crafter,” as opposed to an “artist,” because the things you make are functional and are meant to be used, not hung on a wall?

What is the “best” piece of your artwork, and what about that piece makes it your “best”?

A hero of mine, Seth Godin,writes best-selling books about marketing and the spread of ideas. His blog is one of my very favorites, and is also currently ranked  by Technorati asthe #1 blog in the world written by a single individual. In a recent blog post, he had the following to say on the subject of art:

My definition of art contains three elements:

1. Art is made by a human being.
2. Art is created to have an impact, to change someone else.
3. Art is a gift. You can sell the souvenir, the canvas, the recording… but the idea itself is free, and the generosity is a critical part of making art.

By my definition, most art has nothing to do with oil paint or marble. Art is what we we’re doing when we do our best work.

I really get a kick out of applying Seth’s definition of art to my own creations, because it really changes which pieces I’d consider my “best” work. Before reading his definition, I would have considered a certain top I made to be my best piece of artwork. Even though I wore the top out to nightclubs, I consider it art because of the time and work I put into it to make it look exactly how I wanted it to be.

The process of making it from scratch involved elements of pattern-making, sewing, fabric painting, jewelry-making, t-shirt transfer, and embellishing on fabric techniques, none of which I had ever tried before. I was very happy with the final result, and having made the piece from start to finish without any outside instruction and only my vision to guide me, it really became so much more than just a top. It is an expression of who I was and what I wanted to look like at the time.

But of course I didn’t take a break from tearing up the dancefloor to mention to my clubbing buddies that I had made the top I was wearing. We were busy living in the moment and it was far too loud to have an in-depth discussion about the process by which my current garment had come to be. I wore this top, my masterpiece, a few times and now it sits at the back of my closet. Considering how much I put into the creation of that shirt, it hasn’t really enjoyed much of a life. I am really the only person it has touched in any way.

There is one thing I made as a teenager, that I never would have considered “art,” but it suddenly came to mind after I read Seth’s definition of art. One Saturday when I was about 12 years old my mother bought a wooden dresser for my bedroom from a neighbor’s garage sale. The dresser had a fresh coat of white paint on it and was functional, I was more or less happy with it. One day about a year later, I found myself in possession of a few bottles of spray paint and without a second thought, I emptied that dresser of its contents and dragged it out of my room, down the hall, and out onto the front lawn.

I had a great time spray painting that dresser all grafitti-style, and it ended up looking really cool in my opinion – with a bright, red-sprayed bottom coat, a big golden-yellow sun, and some black squigglies on top. The whole project took about ten minutes, but believe me, the looks I saw on the faces of my sister, my parents, and even the neighbors (who had been watching from their windows, completely dumbfounded) were completely priceless!

Whenever I had friends over after that, they’d ask my where I got a dresser like that and I’d tell them the story. Assuming I had received my parents’ permission to do the project, they would tell my mom she was really cool for letting me do what I did and she would smile and say she hadn’t really “let” me do anything.

My friends struggled to wrap their heads around the fact that I had just done what I felt like doing that day and hadn’t really cared about what would happen to me, my dresser, or the poor grass that was beneath it and ended up painted red, gold, and black. The story of the dresser seemed to quietly shift obedient children into that inevitable Rebellious Teenager Stage right before my eyes. If that piece of art didn’t deliver an impact, change people, and act as a generous (if slightly twisted) gift, then I don’t know what would!

It’s totally hilarious for me to imagine the esteemed Seth Godin declaring that veritable eyesore of a dresser to be my “masterpiece,” but his ideas about art definitely do have merit. Try applying his definition of art to your own work and see if it changes how you perceive it’s value at all.

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