The word art has a long history that confirms its complexity� Its modern use must be located in the Latin ars, meaning art, skill, craft� Most European lan-guages borrow the Latin lexeme: English and French art; Italian, Spanish and Portuguese arte� Others adopt a semantically similar root, originally coming from
the Proto-Germanic kunnana, “to know how to”, German, Danish, Dutch and Norwegian translate it as kunst, Swedish, konst� A peculiar difference in origin but not in meaning is represented by the Greek τεχνη (“tekne”), meaning, once again, skill or craft� The latter is most significantly the origin of the modern word technique and its derivatives, technical, technology and so on� Both in Germanic and Romance languages art is related to the semantic field of practical skills�
We can infer that, in our culture, art historically refers to what is made by hu-man beings requiring skills, crafts and capabilities, and which is at the same time meaningful, meaning-generating and to be shared with others� Still today, in spite of the many challenges of avant-garde experiments of cross-contamination, such as the ready-made or happenings, art is in our linguistic perception some-thing linked to the tradition of “handicraft”, somesome-thing made with the hands or whole body, which at the same time is meaningful and is to be shared in a given community� The application of skills, though, is only one side of a multifaceted phenomenon, constituted by the drive and purpose of a project and by the pro-duction of a meaningful product, which is at the same time material and meta-phoric and is to be shared with someone else� The artistic process, as any other form of communication, is accomplished when a maker produces “something”
(a work of art, a performance, an event, a display), which is purposely made for a receiver, to be perceived, understood and metabolised�
Art, however, should not be confused with creativity� First of all, it is still very much debated whether creativity is a domain-specific or domain-general phenomenon� Creativity studies do not agree whether creativity is specific to a given domain or not� Is the domain of the arts the only creative one? What about the domains of science, technology and engineering? As thoroughly dis-cussed in Baer (2010, pp� 321-341) the domain-specific argument has its evi-dence and counter-evievi-dence� Our approach is that creativity is domain-specific insofar as it always happens in a specific context, but it is not a unique trait of a specific professional domain� That is to say that we believe artists to be creative per practice –rather than per definition– and that creative individuals or envi-ronments can be found in domains other than artistic ones� To be creative per practice means that one’s work consists routinely and systematically in experi-mentation and in finding new problems and/or solutions that are meaningful to others, as the arts do� Any artistic process or product or performance is an original interpretation of some sort, which is meaningful to someone or appro-priate to a given situation� However, the functions of the arts are more complex and diverse than the mere creation of something new with value� In other words, the creativity function is not always primarily active in the arts� The arts serve, often simultaneously, different functions or combinations of functions: creation
of beauty, feeling of sociality, well-being, cognitive challenges, problem solv-ing, provocation and rebellion, aesthetic pleasure and so on� These functions are even active in art practices within mass culture and technical reproduction, where the arts are consumer goods that can be reproduced mechanically or are mere divertissements� The culture of the masses and mass media that McLu-han has so acutely described (McLuMcLu-han 2003) is the cradle of the commodifica-tion of art, a social phenomenon that shifts the art hermeneutic into that of a reproduction model, in which art practices do not necessarily involve novelty, but rather the duplication of standards� This would be impossible for Dewey to whom artistic activities are always a creation or a re-creation or, in other words, an active human endeavour (Dewey 2005, p� 113)�
In spite of these necessary distinctions between creativity and art, some of our artists point to a common connection� One of the members of The Mira Quartet makes it explicit: “to me, creativity is something you do not quite know where it goes… and you can also call it art”� What she means by this “something” is not further developed, but between the lines we read the presence of a process and a capacity driving the process� Probably, the arts and creativity have in com-mon a process that bears and accepts not-knowing, that has a fuzzy end and that “you” as creative individual do not fully comprehend� According to designer Rune Fjord creativity is a human capacity that almost defines human beings as such: “creativity for me is fundamental to being human� It’s the question that you see in the baby that has just been born, […] who very quickly explores the world and asks questions in order to develop and understand� I think simply, it is in fact what makes us human� So fundamentally, I believe it is� And so it is not some-thing that is reserved only for art, […] but creativity is somesome-thing that makes us, as humanity and society, also evolve”� Fjord could not have come closer to what evolutionary studies on the adaptive origins and social value of the arts are dis-covering, supported by neuroscience� Scientists who agree on the adaptive func-tion of art find three main arguments for denying a purely hedonic role –or even the absolute lack of adaptive role– of the arts� The first argument derives from evolutionary biology and looks at the arts as markers of sexual fitness (Levitin 2006, p� 254)� According to this theory, creativity is what helped our ancestors select the fittest individuals - the ones that could respond more flexibly and crea-tively to environmental challenges� “Improvisation and novelty in a combined music/dance performance would indicate the cognitive flexibility of the dancer, signaling his potential for cunning and strategizing while on the hunt” (Levitin 2006, p� 254)� A second argument is the adaptive promotion of social connectiv-ity� According to anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are what helped us as hominids to survive in the wilderness by means of the ritual celebration of
one-heartedness and like-mindedness (Dissanayake 2000, 1995)� Going back to the mother-infant intimacy bond, the rhythm and prosody of language, sounds and movements are what connected –socially and emotionally– human beings, with the result of strengthening the social bonds that were necessary for survival�
The third argument draws on cognitive and neuroscientific studies and attrib-utes to the arts the role of promotion of learning and cognitive development (Levitin 2006, p� 260)� Participating in artistic experiences, even if to different degrees, stimulates the human brain and moulds the mind in growth paradigms (Brown & Parsons 2008, Hustvedt 2012b, Kindler 2003, Levitin 2006)�
In spite of our belief that artists are not creative per definition we came, as already mentioned, to the conclusion that they are creative per practice� The sys-tematic, professional artistic practice not only includes creative processes but also accepts and expects acts of creativity, acts of novelty and appropriateness�
Professional practice comes with preparation, training and exercise; it comes with identity and self-awareness� Artists, for the fact of being involved in the practice of experimenting, finding problems and solutions, are constantly gener-ating something creative –something new– or recregener-ating something anew� The domain of the arts even contemplates the very re-definition of appropriateness and novelty� For instance, to what or to whom is an artistic act of rebellion or provocation appropriate when it is conceptualised as in Camus, as an “act of real creation” (Camus 2003, p� 626)� What is the purpose of hip-hop music? Which appropriateness is Duchamp’s pissoir an answer to? These questions contribute to widening a culture’s epistemological prospects and have a value in themselves�
They tend to be a redefinition of values and concepts�