McCloud – Chapter 7

What is Art?

At the beginning of Chapter 7, McCloud emphatically proclaims that comics are a work of art. But what is “art?” Can it be defined? McCloud’s definition of art is intriguing. Art can only be defined if it is compared to something it is not. McCloud claims that human beings’ two basic instincts are survival and reproduction, and that art is practically any human behavior whose purpose or goal does not include those two things. As intelligent and complex beings, we must have forms of self-expression and communication. We are typically unaware that our simple, everyday interactions with the environment and with each other are actually forms of art. McCloud provides an example of cave people engaged in various artistic behaviors without even understanding what they’re doing. A man is tapping a rock in a rhythmic way and enjoying the sound it produces, a girl is unconsciously singing, and a woman is drawing in the dirt with a stick. None of these actions can be directly correlated with survival and reproduction, so there must be another concept to define why they exist – art.

Later in the Chapter, McCloud introduces the “Six Steps.”

1. Idea/Purpose

2. Form

3. Idiom

4. Structure

5. Craft

6. Surface

McCloud argues that, “any artist creating any work in any medium will always follow these six steps whether they realize it or not.” He also claims that regardless of the initial arrangement of the steps, they will innately fall into this order before an actual work of art is produced. And, although the art is created using these steps, for the artist to truly learn something from his or her work, the process must be viewed in reverse. Once something has been formed, the artist must travel back to the core of his/her creation to find the seemingly unanswerable question – why did I create this?

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