Having written about artists selling their ideas of art, I have been thinking about the matter of what I call DIY (Do It Yourself) art. Or perhaps it should be called "kit art" or "some assembly (and parts) required art." Traditionally, when someone buys art they are usually buying a finished product such as a painting, sculpture or play. There are, of course, exceptions such as when people buy works that were left unfinished by the death of the artist. However, the usual intent is to buy a completed work.
However, as I noted in the previous essay, there are artists who sell works that are incomplete. In some cases, the "work" is merely a short description such as DeWitt's “Alternate Yellow Ink and Pencil Straight, Parallel Lines, of Random Length, Not Touching the Sides." The person who purchases such a work has to provide both the materials and the labor in order to have the work instantiated. Interestingly, these works do not come cheap-there seems to be no "discount" of the sort one expects to get when buying a set of plans for something as opposed to the completed object.
There are arguments in favor of taking such directions as being art. First, they could be seen as being on par with other DIY art such as paint by number or art kits for various items. True, the paint by numbers sets and art kits provide materials as well as the directions, but this could be regarded as a modest difference. After all, if something can be sold as art that requires the purchaser to add labor, it would also seem that requiring the purchaser to also provide the material would not change matters much.
One obvious reply is that it could be argued that when one buys a paint by number set or an art kit, one is not buying art. To use an analogy, if you buy eggs, flour, milk and a recipe for a cake, you are not buying a cake. Rather, you are buying what you will need to make a cake. Likewise, for the art-buying the idea is no more buying the art than buying a cookbook is buying meals.
Second, it could be argued that what makes something a work of art is not the matter that composes it or the labor that constructed it. Rather, it is the idea or concept behind the art. To use the obvious analogy to Plato's forms, the true art lives in the realm of ideas and not in the instantiation of the idea. As such, it does not matter which hands complete the work, it is the mind that conceived it that is the artist.
One obvious reply is that while this does have some appeal, the creation of art seems to require more than merely thinking of a brief idea. In some cases, the substantial idea can be considered art -- such as the writing of a song or conceiving a poem. However, merely coming up with a description or short directions as in the example above hardly seems to count. To use a rather obvious example, if I say "a story in which suspense builds until the twist ending blows the audiences' mind" I have not thereby created a novel: I actually have to do the work for it to be a work of art. If I merely provide a title, such as "Brittle Soul", I also do not create art. Likewise, merely providing a short description of how to make a work of art would not itself be art, but merely a possible recipe (or even just a potential title) for art.
