What is Art?

Romeo and Juliet has shifted into the category of “high art” due to its transformation from function to form; that is over time the play began to look less like our own world and more like that of a time bygone allowing it to take on an art aesthetic and move away from resembling our everyday life. The language began to sound less like that of our own and as a result required deeper thought to process and relate the story to our own lives. 

Adaptations, though, re-ground the original story in function. When the plot is re-imagined in our own world and is recognizable we are able to more easily process what we are seeing/reading/hearing. Adaptations allow a modern audience to have instantly recognizable feelings. Bourdieu describes in his article "Distinction and the Aristocracy of Culture" that according to theory emotion makes something ordinary. He writes, “a systematic refusal of all that is ‘human’, by which he means the passions, emotions and feelings which ordinary people put into their ordinary existence, and consequently all the themes and objects capable of evoking them: ‘People like a play when they are able to take an interest in the human destinies put before them’, in which they ‘participate as if they were real life events’” (177). An example of how Westside Story is “functional” as opposed to simply a subject of artistic form comes in the number “Gee, Office Krupke.” In the song the Jets sing satirically of how they ended up in their current situation. They sing of lacking parental love and care, i.e. social guidance to learn right and wrong. This song relates to a social function and as a result shifts it away from simply having an aesthetic form. 

https://ramblingrooby.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/jay-z-the-artist-picasso-baby-a-performance-art-film/