Response to Sarah's Entry

I am responding to Sarah’s question; “Can culture alone be considered art?”
Culture does fit many of the criteria we use to consider works as ‘art’:
-If an observer intends a culture to be art, then, like a sunset, it would be art.
-Like Jurgen Habernmas stated about art, culture also “satisfies an emancipatory interest, the desire to be free of unnecessary and oppressive social constraints” (Wartenberg 11).
-Just as some art is created to reflect a time period, culture, by nature, must reflect a time period.
There are many scenarios in which culture could be considered art. However, one should take into account the ideal of cultural relativism. One of the strictest laws of anthropology is that an observer of a culture must maintain a culturally relativistic perspective ofa culture, and thus cannot consider any culture to be superior or inferior to another (This may seem strange to us—we have been trained since birth to consider our culture to be superior than that of an African Bushman’s. We must keep in mind that their culture has adapted to be the most efficient way of living in their environment. Different cultures have formed as a result of different obstacles, and none can be considered better or worse than another). As stated by Wartenberg in the introduction, any definition of art must allow for evaluation. Because culture cannot be evaluated, it cannot be art.

QUESTION: I asked in a previous blog entry if art could be defined as an expression of human creativity. Nick pointed out that, because animals are also capable of creating art, this cannot be accurate. And so I am broadening my question a bit—Could art be defined as an expression of creativity?