Little-Known Arts

I’m going to define an “art,” for my limited purposes here, as a body of knowledge and practice which is absorbed experientially and therefore through an in-person community. You could also call an art in this sense a traditional practice, a cultured knowledge, or a craft.

By this definition, arts may cease to be arts if they do are not confined to certain communities; then they become subjects. For instance, cooking is now less of an art (by my usage of the term) than it used to be. The English had terrible cooking and the French had excellent cooking, but now that we can look up recipes and techniques online, cooking has become less of an art and more of a discrete body of knowledge.

Arts in this sense fascinate me because they may become richly developed, and yet their place in this world remains precarious, because they live only in a particular community. You need to know the people in order to learn it. Ideas committed to paper are much more durable and easily transmissible, and thus less in danger of being lost and having to be rediscovered.

Now, even in subjects like mathematics, the practice, art, or craft of mathematics remains. That is, there’s more to math than the reasoning to be found in math books. There’s an art of problem-solving best communicated and practiced in person. Nevertheless, mathematics is more of a subject than an art. You really can learn it from books, if the books are clearly written, or online interactively.

Here are some areas that I believe remain arts:

• martial arts, which globalization has done so much for in the past 30 years, systematizing, cross-fertilizing, refining.

• meta-learning, because generations of students have no idea that there is more to learning beyond “this subject is hard or easy” and “I am smart or slow.”

• conflict resolution: again, most people, even elite university graduates, only have mental tools at the level of “this person is nice or mean,” and “good or bad relationship.”

• exercise and mobilization are subject to so much disinformation that the good stuff remains a bit of an art.

• Finally, pair programming communicates some of the art or craft of software creation.

One hallmark of an art is that among the communities which lack such arts - most people in most places and in most times - fragments of the art live in small pockets as they are discovered. The leg-trapping trick of the wrestler two villages over may spread memetically and become part of the culture of the group or region, and if enough of these tricks spread, this collection of memes may make the leap into becoming an art form, systematized and collected. But this happens slowly, if at all, and once formed is easy to lose to history.

An art, being practiced by a community, may become part of the way of life, reflected in (or a reflection of) their deepest beliefs, preserved in small turns of phrase or proverbs. Here is how we express annoyance. Here is how we apologize. Here is how we forgive. Here is how we seek assistance when a disagreement has reached an impasse.

Because a mature art in this sense is most probably part of the warp and woof of daily life - an expert learner probably remains unaware of many of the tricks and habits she employs to learn and retain knowledge - those who possess it may not commit it to writing or any other means of preservation. A developed art deserves to become a subject, as far as it can, but without a certain self-awareness that it is an art form, and one possessed only by the community - without a sense of the art’s place in the world, and the community’s place in the world - those who possess the art may not turn it into a subject.

To discover arts in this sense, you need a broad range of friends, and you need to be on the alert for them, to realize what you’re looking at.