Why Singing in the Shower Might Be Real Art

A Poem Nobody Else Can Hear

Imagine you are a poet sitting in a café. A whole poem suddenly arrives in your head — not as a list of words but as a complete feeling you could recite right away. You do not write it down. Does that poem count as art?

The British philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) answered yes. He believed that the real work of art is an experience inside your mind, not the paint on a canvas or the ink on a page. He called this experience the total imaginative experience. So art could exist without any physical object at all. But he also argued that most things people call art — like skillfully crafted paintings designed to make you laugh or cry — are not truly art. What is? Collingwood’s answer leads to a surprising claim: every time you become aware of your own feelings, you are creating art.

Why Building a Chair and Painting a Picture Are Not the Same

Many ancient thinkers, including Plato (c. 427–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE), thought art was a kind of craft, from the Greek word technê. A craft has clear features. You know what you want to make before you start (the end), you figure out the steps (the means), you gather raw material, you follow a plan, and you turn the raw stuff into a finished product. A watchmaker plans, then assembles.

Collingwood admitted that some art does involve these steps — an opera certainly needs planning. But he pointed out that many works of art involve none of them and are still art. For instance, a poet might “hear” a poem in her head without any step-by-step plan. There is no separate raw material, no blueprint; the poem simply arrives whole. So, he argued, craft-like features are not the essence of art.

The craft theory also leads to a dangerous mistake: thinking of art as a technique to cause a pre-planned emotional reaction in an audience — like a drug. Collingwood fiercely rejected the idea that artists are “purveyors of drugs.” A true artwork is not a trick to make you feel a certain way.

How You Feel What You Didn’t Know You Felt

Collingwood’s own account of art proper starts with a familiar experience. You feel a churning, unsettled emotion inside, but you do not know what it is. All you can say is, “I feel … I don’t know what I feel.” That is a miserable, oppressed state. Then you do something: you speak, sing, gesture, or paint. As you do, the emotion becomes clear. You suddenly realize, “Oh, that’s what this is.” The confusion lifts; your mind feels lighter.

For Collingwood, this activity is expression, and it is the core of art. Expression is not just showing an emotion you already understand — like tears betraying sadness. It is bringing an unknown emotion into consciousness for the first time. The art does not simply point to a feeling; the art embodies it. The emotion is individual — a particular, new awareness — not a general label like “sadness.” And notice: you cannot plan what you are about to express, because you do not know it yet. That is why art cannot be craft: there is no pre-existing end to aim at.

The Song You Sing in Your Head Is Already Art

If expression is the real art, then where does the artwork live? Collingwood gave a surprising answer: entirely in the imagination. He used the example of a scientific lecture. There is the lecture as a sequence of sounds, and there is the lecture as a set of ideas. The ideas are complete in the speaker’s mind even before anyone speaks; the sounds are just a tool to help listeners reconstruct those ideas. Similarly, a tune you hum is, first and foremost, an imagined thing. You do not need to sing it aloud for it to be real; singing is just a sensory aid for your weak human imagination.

The artwork proper is the total imaginative experience — everything you see, feel, and understand when you encounter the piece. This means even a stray melody that pops into your head while walking home is a tiny work of art. Collingwood went further. He thought all deliberate expression is language in a broad sense, and all language is expressive. So every gesture or word you utter is art. Humming in the shower, snapping your fingers, telling a story — all are artworks. But he agreed most of these are shallow. The artist is someone who can sustain and deepen that expressive consciousness and who learns to preserve it through a physical medium.

Why Art Is a Two‑Way Street (And a Few Big Problems)

Collingwood insisted that art is never a lonely activity. Because expression is language, understanding someone else’s artwork means you adopt their expressive act as your own. The listener recreates the artist’s imaginative experience inside themselves — almost as if they were the one singing. So art is inherently collaborative, not the work of a solitary genius.

But this raises a serious problem. If the artwork is just a private total imaginative experience in your head, how can two people ever argue about the same piece? If you and I see a painting and have different experiences, Collingwood’s view seems to say we are each dealing with different artworks, so we could not really disagree. That seems to fly against how we actually talk about art. Many philosophers consider this a fatal flaw.

Another worry: Collingwood claimed all language is emotional expression, even a science textbook. That would erase the difference between a poem and a recipe, which many find absurd. Lastly, his razor-sharp distinction between art and craft may be too strict. If you cannot set out to write a tragedy — as Collingwood concluded, because you don’t know what you will express — then most of what we call art, like carefully planned novels or films, would not be art proper at all.

These objections do not mean Collingwood was wrong about everything. His ideas force us to think about why we create, how we come to know our own feelings, and whether a tune hummed in the shower deserves the name “art.” Even if you disagree, his theory invites you to notice the art in everyday life and to see every conversation as a little piece of shared expression.

Think about it

1. If a poem exists only in your mind and you never share it, is it still art? Why or why not?
2. Could a machine ever truly express an emotion, or does it take a living mind?
3. Have you ever discovered what you were feeling by talking or singing about it? Did that feel like making something new?