Is everything art?

Launching myself from one hold to another in the climbing gym, I wondered if the movements counted as art. They weren’t dancing, not overtly. I can’t say I looked graceful, though internally I felt nothing but grace. And certainly no one would pay to watch me fail at that fresh V6 in back. But does something have to last and exist beyond oneself in some form of constructed media, experiential or tangible, to be art? What if it’s just a memory in someone’s mind? And if my climbing counts as art, then what about my bike riding? Or someone jogging? Or one’s choice in shoulder bag? Or the way you walk to work? The way you say goodbye? Any of it. Are we all artists? Is there a moment we are not expressing who we are? Is the world swimming in it, but we just don’t notice most of the time, unless we put ourselves in a special place, some sacred ground where we all agree to notice art, and that space itself compels us to do something different, to move differently, to turn a climb into a dance, to sing not speak, to deliver lines not chitchat, to concentrate and purify the pain and hope and ceaseless friction of want and disappointment and deliverance.

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