Unintentional Art

For our sons eleventh birthday a friend dropped off two helium-filled, three-foot tall silver ‘1’ balloons. Instead of popping them the following day, we cut the strings that tethered them to the stair railing and let them float around the house like a pair of shiny pets.

By complete coincidence, we started watching an excellent new Netflix documentary series about Andy Warhol (The Andy Warhol Diaries) that same week. To our surprise and delight we learned that Warhol had done something similar—releasing silver balloons from the roof of his studio (aka ‘The Factory’) in the fall of 1965. Whereas our temporary art installation was basically unintentional, his was deliberate performance art, an intentional visual statement.

All of this made me think about the thin line that separates intentional art from the unintentional kind. Intentional art I would define as pre-meditated creative output—sculpture, painting, or performance that’s been planned in some way. Unintentional art, by contrast, I would explain as creativity that just kind of happens. It’s a by-product of something else, the result of indirect effort. Let me show you some examples of what I’m talking about.

It’s worth adding that I’m excluding Mother Nature from my description of unintentional art. Nature’s artwork is in a whole other league—masterpiece upon masterpiece of perfectly executed texture, colour, and composition. I’m talking more about art that relies on human intervention. Brooms leaned against walls, fish stacked on a market table, coins thrown in a reflecting pond, pieces of wood slapped together in a certain way, that sort of thing.

Now, I’d understand if you said to me, “Hang on a second, doesn't everything have the potential to be called unintentional art? Doesn't anything become created beauty if we look at it a certain way?” My answer to both questions would be simple: “Yes.”

How we decide to see things, the way we choose to frame things is the difference between seeing art and seeing nothing. As I suggested at the beginning, it’s a fine line. And the beautiful thing is that you get to decide where to draw it. You get to decide what art is.