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gee, dictionary.com presents an even more debilitating definition of art than the others that you have seen fly about in this thread. what exactly does "conscious production" mean?
intent is a slippery notion: it means many things--for example, in husserl, intent can be linked to intentionality, which simply refers to the direction of attention toward something in the world. if that is what the wroking notion of intent is, then sure--but the category is so general that it says nothing about "art" that would distinguish it from looking or hearing.
if by intent you mean to de facto model the mode of thinking within the process of making stuff on the model of how a spectator would see a work, then you are making a fundamental error which has at least two main sources: aesthetic theory itself (whcih severs contemplation of artworks from the processes that account for its fabrication) and traditional epistemology, which models all interactions with the world on the model of a spectator making judgements about it. one of the best texts that i know of that makes this argument--better than i can--is merleau-ponty's "indrect speech and the voices of silence" in signs. abotu halfway through the essay is an account of matisse watching a slow-motion film of himself painting--merleau-ponty's gloss on this story sums up the position ihave come to adopt on it.
im music, the question of non-intent is central to the work of john cage--in composition, you see a move toward setting up situations rather than stipulating outcomes, moves away from conventional notation, away from the 18-19th century division of intellectual labor that split composer and performer. in folks like cage and stockhausen, you see an attempt to square this emphasis on creating situations with a continued function for composition. in the curious worlds of improvisation, the matter gets pushed even further. as someone who has worked in the latter form for many years, i can tell you that the notions of intent that are dragged from traditional epistemology into the space of such practices say nothing at all about those practices.
i take creative activity to be a practical interaction with a medium.
the question of intent is irrelevant.
except in a very general way: you have to be engaged in a process to make things that you would consider releasing into the wider world. but, as i have tried to say above, such engagement is a general precondition for the activity and says nothing about the ways in which particular results are obtained. intent then does not define art: it simply functions as a way to talking about a general condition of possibilty (you have to be doing somehting in order to make anything)...the reason it does not function to define art is that intent--engagement with a process--obtains for any human activity: looking at a toilet, taking a crap, reading a text, watching tv, combing your hair, almost anything involving a verb that links a pronoun to an object, in short.
dictionary definitions are not philosophical treatises: they summarize conventions that shape usage at the point the dictionary was assembled. they are not about conceptual problems: they do not even address them. more often than not, definitions you find in a dictionary reproduce problems because terms are used without regard for the questions that occupy folk at a philosophical level.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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