What is Art?

I have an idea and I'd like some feedback. This discussion came up with Alex when we were on a road trip a few months ago and he asked what I thought art was. I don't remember if any of us talked about it afterward. I was reminded of it because I've been reading a paper on Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality, which as a sidenote y'all should read.

I think we can safely agree that reality, or our experience of it, is fundamentally characterized by chaos and pattern. Each day is a new day, each moment is an entirely new moment, but also falls under the cyclical pattern we call time. Every circumstance is in reality an entirely unprecedented event (though our powers of inference tell us differently), but these events are governed by natural laws. The same thing happens differently over and over and over. This is true for probably almost anything: seasons, days, hours, waves, car manufacturing, the lives of suns, orbits, walking, sex, conversations... This same thing repeating itself in different ways is a fundamental part of our entire experience of reality. It is not that chaos and pattern take turns at governing the universe, but that they are actually inseparable-- their simultaneity is a basic characteristic of reality. The experience of this simultaneity is the experience of Quality, in Pirsig's terms, or in Oriental terms it is the experience of 'nothingness,' or in plain terms it is the experience of the present. And don't get stuck on the term simultaneity, because it implies only half of the truth: the other half is that Pattern and Chaos don't exist at all. 'Both' is still a dualistic answer to the question 'Which?.'

So the question was raised : What is art, and how do we know if it's good or not- or, to use Pirsig's language, how do we know if it has Quality? So here's my theory, briefly: Art's intent is to replicate the artists perception of reality, or balance in the work--whether it be music or drawing or making a collage--pattern and chaos. It does not follow from this that the better the art, in a painting for example, the more realistic. Realism may lean too much toward pattern. And in music: the pattern is in the beat, the chorus, and whatever other musical recurrences there are within the song, and the chaos is in the verse and melody. So the more balanced a piece of art is, the more Quality it has. The variation in artistic taste from person to person is accounted for in our different experiences of reality, and the different way we infer pattern (which is at the base of the whole subconcious logic thing). Each person experience pattern and especially chaos differently. Variation in artistic taste between cultures is even more apparent: much or our perception of reality is socially conditioned. The pattern/chaos duality is one of many. Transcendence of any of them brings us towards, or is an experience of, Dynamic Quality or 'Presence.' I've argued that the the Quality of art is singularly dependent on the pattern/chaos duality. But maybe it's not. Still need to think about that one.

Other questions that have come to mind as I've written:

1. Does the p/c duality hold equal status with other dualities, or is it more fundamental than that, are other dualities subsets or variant descriptions of it in the same way it is a subset--one description--of Dynamic Quality?

2. Determinism has always made a lot of sense to me though on principal I tend to dismiss it as unimportant and a dangerous philosophical black whole of overblown semantics and meaningless rhetoric and logic loops. That said, isn't chaos really impossible to prove? It's arrogant and more than a little stupid to assume we're capable of perceiving any pattern that exists. This is one of the mistakes of science (sorry Matt had to pull that out, ok, the Scientific Method). For example, here is a pattern

akjakjak

here is another less obvious pattern

hdsafjkldsjfjkal;sjf dl;kasfj oi;eaj;lkdf ife;ajdkf jkfdjf;aiwejf jkfdl;ahdsafjkldsjfjkal;sjf dl;kasfj oi;eaj;lkdf ife;ajdkf jkfdjf;aiwejf jkfdl;ahdsafjkldsjfjkal;sjf dl;kasfj oi;eaj;lkdf ife;ajdkf jkfdjf;aiwejf jkfdl;a

That one repeated three times too and is just as predictable as the first, but because of the limited capacity of our intellects appears more chaotic. Now here's some chaos:

asdfkjkl;adsjfdakjfdkjafewioajfkldsjlksjagioajwklngklfsjfdkjfdiwlkjaoigfrwejagkskjgs;adlirjfewiaofjlig;jlia;gfsdkalgjklsajfiujhgir;airjagk;sdfgijds;klfjkdsljfkdlsajflasdkjfdilsjflaidsjfdksajfilekjaijdsfksdjg kljgkljsdgijraigjliaerjgkfjgkljsf;alkfdjklgaskdfjgjg;irja;kfdjg kjgijalia glk

Maybe we're in the middle of it marveling at all the never-before-seen shapes and colours but really none of us have lived long enough or will live long enough (or don't have enough data capacity in our heads) to know that it's it's just one repetition among infinite repetitions. How do we know the chaos above isn't just a fragment of a much longer string that is repeated over and over just like the rest. Maybe chaos is just our name for patterns we're too small to grasp. I don't even know if this is relevant; in fact it's probably irrelevant for the same reasons I usually dismiss determinism: our experience of reality is what is pertinent (especially discussing Dynamic Quality), not our theories about it. What's the difference, for us, between chaos and patterns that we are too small to grasp? Or do some theories point to realities of our experience we've been numbed to- do they actually arise out of some subconscious knowing? That is potentially a really important question and the answer probably lies within the intention and consciousness with which we go about theorizing.