Art encompasses everything that humans create and express. Art is, in essence, human expression itself.

Since the dawn of time, humankind has traced signs. In the Chauvet Cave, more than thirty thousand years ago, a hand pressed itself against the wall to leave a pigment imprint. Was it a ritual gesture, a mark of possession, an attempt to depict the animal world that surrounded it? We will never know, but one thing is certain: already there was the desire to express. That first gesture, fragile and monumental at once, tells us that art begins where humanity seeks to make visible what it feels.

For a long time, art was considered an imitation of reality. To carve a Greek god in marble, to paint the light of a Tuscan landscape—this was to copy the world in order to grasp its essence. Yet modernity revealed that art was far more than faithful representation. Kandinsky painted abstract canvases to give form to the music he heard, Pollock flung paint onto canvas to inscribe his own gesture, Yves Klein immersed bodies in blue to turn presence itself into a work of art. In each case, it was no longer a matter of imitation, but of saying otherwise. As if art were always the search for an additional language, an alphabet of colors, sounds, and forms.

Ernst Cassirer reminded us that man is a “symbolic animal”: he does not simply live in the world, he translates it into images and gestures. The child who clumsily draws a house is not merely imitating a façade—he projects an inner universe, a shelter, a sense of belonging. Similarly, folk art, so often neglected by official history, expresses this same creative force: work songs, Polynesian tattoos, the patterns of African pottery. None of these were made for museums, and yet they are art, for humanity speaks through them.

John Dewey, the American philosopher, insisted that art is an experience. It resides not only in the finished object, but in the vibration that flows between the one who creates and the one who looks, listens, or feels. Who has not felt that silent emotion before a painting, as with Monet’s Water Lilies, where one no longer sees flowers, but the very experience of trembling light? Who has not sensed that a simple song, hummed by an anonymous voice in the subway, became—for just an instant—a work of art, because it contained an entire life condensed in a few notes? Art does not need gilded frames: it manifests wherever humans express what they are.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty went further: to paint, he said, is “to make vision visible.” The artist does not copy the world—he reveals our way of perceiving it. Thus, when Van Gogh painted a chair, it was not merely furniture he showed, but solitude, a silent presence. The banal object became the witness of an existence. Art is not in the thing represented, but in the human expression that dwells within it.

Anthropologists such as Alfred Gell remind us that all cultures, without exception, have produced art. In Melanesian villages, the decorated canoes are as much works of art as Europe’s Gothic cathedrals: each, in its own way, expresses a people’s relationship to the world, to the sacred, to their ancestors. Art is not the privilege of a few civilizations; it is the very breath of humanity.

Thus, across centuries and continents, from the prehistoric hand on rock to the contemporary installation, from folk melody to symphonic grandeur, from religious icon to urban graffiti, one same impulse remains: to express what moves us. To give form to what we cannot always put into words, but which insists on being made visible—in matter, in sound, in color, in gesture.

So what is art? It is neither merely beauty, nor virtuosity, nor institution. It is the universal movement by which man, fragile and grandiose at once, seeks to say “I am here,” to reveal his way of inhabiting the world, to offer others the sharing of his being. In truth, art is everything man does and expresses. Art is human expression itself.