In its most simple definition, art is human expression through different forms of communication. Be they, music, painting or drawing, writing, whether it's creative stories or poems or even song lyrics, or it can even be physical expression like dance or acting and other types of performances, much like putting on a magic act in a tv show where you literally burn an American flag to express and communicate the figurative concept that our rights are greater than the symbols we use to represent them. The idea that even though the representative symbol of our rights may have been destroyed, the rights themselves (the important part) remain. Even if the declaration of independence and the constitution were destroyed in a fire (not that I think they should be), the rights themselves would remain because we still believe in them
My definition of art is: Intentional expression of human emotion through human sensory media. My intention is to exclude communication of pure data or information (is a weather satellite an artist? I don't want to include that), and to include communication of non-information such as anger or indignance, as well as to include all means of sensory communication.
Thus, a stand-up comic is an artist because he deliberately uses his verbal media to induce laughter (perhaps make them think as well, but the laughter has to come first). A good comic does it the way Babe Ruth called his home runs and the way Muhammad Ali called his knockouts.
That is the entire essence of inalienable rights that people miss when they decide to defend symbols like a flag over the rights themselves that the symbol represents. That because we choose to hold them as true, they can never be taken away or destroyed, no matter what people do to the flag.
One thing to remember, btw, is that conceptual entities do not have rights--beings have rights. I have to go Godwin on this point, but a major factor of the Hitler-Mussolini theory of fascism is that the nation is an organic entity in itself (the
Volk--the
Volkprinzip) with its own will (embodied by one particular individual, the
Fuhrer--the
Fuhrerprinzip) and thus as an organic willful entity it has rights that supersede the rights of the individual.
The Constitution carries the idea that citizens have non-enumerated rights and that citizens convey certain
enumerated powers to government. That's why the government does not have, for instance, copyright of anything produced by government employees.
Thus, the flag is a symbol of an entity that that has no rights.
