I listened to a podcast episode about Bruce Lee not long ago. He was absolutely relentless in refining his fighting technique, always incorporating new tactics learned from other methods, and inventing his own. And he wasn’t globally famous until after he died.
That is funny as hell :)
But, as a tangent, art is an expression of self. Martial arts are part of a refinement of the self, and expresses one’s physical self in a way that’s unique even from other forms of physical expression like dance.
Your body becomes your canvas, and the art itself your paint (or brushes depending on how you want to look at it).
While even the least aggressive martial arts do include the possibility of violence, violence isn’t the inherent goal. Even MMA, where violence is a necessary part of expressing oneself through the art, it isn’t necessarily the goal of MMA as an art.
But, stuff like tai chi doesn’t usually include any sparring much less actual fights. But they still hold the potential of violence.
When you get into some styles, you’ll run into he principle that you train to not fight. You train to minimize violence when you have to fight.
So there’s a good part of martial arts that is art in the conventional sense as well as the practice and craft usage of arts.
Plus, just like when you finish a painting, or put the finishing touches on a story, reaching a point of mastery of a specific move fulfills (or can fulfill) a very similar part of the self. You spend thousands of repetitions refining body’s movements until it coalesces in one perfect moment, one perfect motion, and there’s a joy in that moment that has nothing to do with any of the violence involved. In a class setting, you’ll even have your fellow students recognize that you achieved something meaningful and beautiful.
Without contact, there’s a great deal of similarity between a kata or other solo performance and something like dance. Some of the weapons displays are so similar to something like breakdancing that people who do both can incorporate moves from either into a performance of the other and nobody watching would notice that it wasn’t an existing move.
And don’t even get going on something like capoeira!
