Contrary to Roachboy, I'm not sure how someone could create art without the thought "I'm going to create art". Sure, their thought is usually more specific (I'm going to create poetry), but how often do you just 'accidentally' create art? Maybe law school is frying my brain for this sort of thing, but a specific example would be helpful.

who said it was accidental?
art is what other people call the results of a process---i am sure that some folk think i am making art now, but it seems unnecessary. everyone i know who is involved with creative work makes far more stuff than they would show. everyone i know works in one version or another of a series--you get preoccupied with a particular phenomenon or a particular problem technically and for whatever reason you work at it, on it...hopefully, within a given series you would produce some things that you might consider showing to others, and maybe within that some that you would consider releasing into the wider world. those pieces are neither accidental, nor are they inevitable: they constitute a subset of what amount to formalizations of an engagement within the larger context of a process of interacting with a medium. and the question of whether the results that you like enough to release are understood our there as "art" has no definite relation to the processes that go into it, nor any direct relation to the dispositions that might explain why you pursue that process.

on the other hand, having some of your work come to be considered art is not a bad thing--like i said earlier in the thread, such labels make it easier to get access to money and/or to advantageous spaces to perform/show. this funding/venue shift might impact on your work--but it might not as well. there would be no definite relation between the two: just as many folk would be inclined to protect their process and change little except perhaps to be able to live a little easier as would be inclined to take the labels seriously and decide, every time they started working, to say I AM MAKING ART NOW or its equivalent.

all this is the problem of definition: you want stable features. there arent any, apart from the social processes that shape/legitimate the label "art" and the folk who attribute that label.

I feel that it can not be defined. Art can be anything to anyone and who is to say they are wrong.

One of my brothers recently got married and his wife is an "art snob" (sorry for using that term, but she is in art school and seems to think art is only a certain thing. Aparently almost every art student there has been brainwashed by this). My other brother is in video game design and he is an absolutely amazing concept artist. My sister in law doesn't feel that it is art and is not afraid to voice how she feels that what the concept ARTIST does is simply designs. If you could see the hurt in his eyes you would know how much what he does means to him, that makes it the most beautiful art of all, it has profound meaning to the person who created it. I have no idea where I am going with this, but art can not be disproven and I feel it is wrong and hurtful to say that someones drawing or what-have-you is not art.

I know exactly what you're saying; that was sort of my point, too.

But I guess one type of example might be found in "folk art"--you know, objects that are created for some specific purpose within a particular culture, but which are deemed "art" by the dominant culture (usually after the dominant culture has practically obliterated the culture that created the "folk art".) Art people, help me out here. Some examples might be...I dunno...Navajo blankets? Kachina dolls? Pottery created by assorted tribespeople? Cave paintings? Fetishes? Just some thoughts...

I'm thinking that the creators of that kind of art may have been saying to themselves, "I'm going to make something that will please the gods/bring rain/encourage crop growth/carry stream water/assist the hunting party/" ...or whatever. Does that lack of express intent to 'create art' somehow disqualify these objects as 'art'? And is it even desirable to call them 'art'? Doesn't that proclamation, in and of itself, sort of reek of a type of colonization--the dominant culture explaining to another culture, "You may think that object you made is going to bring rain, but really it's just Art."

Another example of 'art without intent' would be "art" that was created by animals--check out the bowerbird link; it's cool, I promise.

Let's take Karen Finley and the whole performance art thing for a minute. I'm pretty sure Miss Finley and her ilk are specifically aiming to create 'Art' when they do what they do. Many people would say that they do not succeed. When Annie Sprinkle does her dildo show, is she making art or porn?

And, as far as stripping goes: What if a stripper dances with the primary intent of making money from the crowd, but she's a talented dancer who works hard to express her sheer pleasure in moving body to music, and she does it particularly artfully? Could we say that it's art, even though she has no intention of creating art? I tend to think not, but I'm not sure why...Will ponder later. (getting sleepy....)

According to our friends at Dictionary.com, art is:

I'd say this is about right, although I am not entirely convinced that art is necessarily a conscious effort. [Assuming God doesn't exist] Can landscapes be works of art even though they are not consciously designed?

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.