What makes art?

Being a logical geek, I find that just about everything in life can be boiled down to an algorithm or formula. Some are more complicated than others, and I don't understand a lot of them very well, but that doesn't make it not true..

A conundrum that vexed me for some while is the question of what makes art art. I talked to one man who was of the opinion that all it takes to create a poem is to write something with personal meaning, something that need not be accessible or meaningful to anyone else.

This never sat quite right with me, but not having nailed down the definition of what actually makes something art, I didn't have any well thought out retorts at the time. I believed that art should be accessible to a larger audience then the person who created it, but where do you draw the line? Is it art when 50% of the people who see it come away with some appreciation for what you created?

Since then, I have become convinced that accessibility does not actually have anything to do with art. I think most real art is accessible to a large number of people, but its accessibility is not what makes it art.

To me, art seems to be the result of a function that takes two parameters: complexity and coherence. If you have something with high complexity that is totally incoherent, such as many pieces of modern art, I would call it a poor example of art.

On the flip side, if an art piece is coherent and straightforward but has no complexity, I would see little reason to laud it either.

It is when you create something that is both highly complex and yet still understandable that you create what I would call art. It is accessible because it is enjoyable, and it makes a lasting impression for something other than shock value.