Last week we heard about public engaging arts at MoMA. One that I am particularly impressed by is where artists pretend to be secret police and take people in and educate them on art history. This form of art is composed of both the effort from the artist and the participants. In fact, the boundary between the participant and the artist is blurred, and boundary between the participant or artist and the artwork itself is blurred.
This makes me think: might it be true that artists are themselves part of their own artworks, not just for publicly engaging arts, but even for the more traditional art forms such as paintings where the artist who made them seems distant from the artwork per se.
Connect to what I posted about earlier:if an artist defines art to some extent, then it makes sense that the embedding of emotion or experience into artworks is what essentially makes art art.