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My DVR records the servies Frontline whose episodes accumulate because Frontline tackles serious and often depressing topics which are usually hard to watch.

True to form, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 they aired Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. The show was very thought provoking and I captured a couple memorable quotes—one from author Ian McEwan and another from opera singer Rene Fleming. Both these quotes relate to questions of faith and faithlessness surrounding those tragic events.

As I watched and listened I also came across a very interesting definition of art given by Kirk Varnedoe, curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art:

Its true that art transports you, that it gives you the sense that you can find other worlds than the ones that you know are inside of you.

There are so many imagined worlds. Each artist creates a world with its own logic and its own set of rules in which you can move in and inhabit. They find form that lets you imaginatively take part in experiences with which you may not have had any contact, and for a moment, conceive of a world as pearlescent and as beautifully, rectilinearly ordered as a Piero.

To feel these things through art expands the reach of who you are. But art doesnt only transport you to new, imagined places. It also, in the best sense, narrows your vision, focuses with a new immediacy on the things that may be the most familiar to you. It gives a new spiritual dimension to the objects that you touch, to the room that you inhabit. And this is not just a tidy or comfortable experience but can be suffused with a kind Dionysian pleasure, in the sense of the small world controlled and the poetry of the world possessed, this crossing over of the line between what is the love of the material thing, of the dust mote in the sunlight or the sheen of the porcelain, of the look of the ivy winding around the bowl of fish, you know, this sort of pleasure in the daily small things.

In art, through art, I think, transmutes itself into a form of spirituality…

via Transcripts | Faith And Doubt At Ground Zero | FRONTLINE | PBS.

I think that I now have my answer to the question “What is art?”.