What is art?

Perhaps another way to put it, how would one define art?

I would define it as any creative endeavour that intentionally generates an emotional response. Good art generates a strong response; bad art generates indifference.

edited 27th Sep '11 10:17:39 PM by tropetown

Whatever one wants it to be.

No, because that would include "Interior Semiotics" as art. And if you decide to google it, watching the video would be NSFW.

Actually, Aon has a point, if one that is painfully cliche. Although it did get so absurd that that one guy put up a toilet or something to make a point that not everything is art. Because, well, after all that absurdism and surrealism that happened it just seemed like people were faking being deep and all. (And sadly that trend does not seem to have gone away entirely.)

Uh. actually. The point of Fountain was to point out "just wtf isnt art?"

Duchamp's entire purpose was to troll people by pointing out that even a toilet can be art.

Art is arbitrary, anything can be art, if people with high cultural capital accept it as art.

Cultural capital is the amount of influence a person has in the realm of culture. Influental artists, gallerists, museum curators, collectors, art professors, art critics, and officials who hand out funding for grants and museums have very high cultural capital. Less prominent artists, frequent museum visitors, art bloggers etc. have slightly less capital, and people who don't consern themselves with art at all have little to none of it.

I like the definition that art is anything that evokes feelings. I also argue that it has to be something an individual artist or collective of artisdts either created, or found and presented in a specific manner. Any more narrow definition can easily exclude legitimate art.

Chick tracts invoke feelings. They invoke feelings of disgust, and hatred.

Are they art?

There is no art.

There are only artists.

Are they meant to invoke those feelings? If they are, then they are art (trolling is a art) and if they aren't they aren't art.

arrrrrr

edited 28th Sep '11 8:04:28 AM by honorius

If someone considers them art, then yes. Terrible, insulting to the intelligence art is still art.

Otherwise us art major types couldnt call stuff like Piss Christ art without being called hypocrites.

Thats actually the entire POINT behind Duchamp's Fountain, and most other Dada artists who werent hangers on to the movement. The concept of "what is and isnt art, and can we truly dismiss a crayon drawing a 4 year old makes for their dad as "not true art"?

edited 28th Sep '11 8:40:41 AM by Midgetsnowman

Art- Anything made with a creative purpose.

So pretty much anything, if you want. The problems arise when you want to distinguish between good art and bad art or high art and low art.

edited 28th Sep '11 9:50:32 AM by Pentadragon

I love Duchamp. That day out to the Tate Modern was so worth it.

Really, I'm interested in the cultural capital theories outlined above. There's, as one might expect, a lot of debate in that territory alone. I find that it's fun to read up on when I'm in the mood, after I've re-discovered the Gramsci territory for the 20,583rd time. So this might warrant another post from me later.

Because otherwise I probably subscribe to the Lisa Turtle School.

Art is a blight upon society that the dregs from academia insist on keeping around to appease their own sense of aesthetics.

Whatever one can appreciate.

I think art is an expression of the soul,the dreams the artist has,the interests he likes,and the way they see life.

Although I fail to see how a big can of soup is considered art because I could just go to a megastor and take a picture of it.

A miserable little pile of secrets.

Art is a creative expression of pretty much any sort. Then others start piling meanings on it because that's how some people make themselves feel smart.

Making a print is a tad harder, for one thing.

For secondly, sometimes art is done specifically to troll.

If it's a creative expression meant to generate an emotional response, it is art. Whether or not it's good art, on the other hand, is up to the one looking at it, though if its intention was to generate emotion, I'd personally say it's done its job.

Hell yes, and the idea that the answer could be "no" is the biggest stumbling block in defining art! People point to all sorts of things that are normally crappy (video games, advertisements, AMVs), and say that because they're crap, they're not art, and because they're not art, nothing like them can ever be art. I think that a proper definition of art must include the crap and the failures, if only to allow for the times when someone actually succeeds at creating good art in an unsuccessful genre.

(As for the soup cans, I consider label design a subdivision of advertising, focused on manipulating people's feelings to make them buy things off the shelves. It's pretty easy to argue that advertising is art, so Warhol was guilty of plagiarism.)

edited 28th Sep '11 5:54:40 PM by feotakahari

Warhol wasnt very interesting imo. But damn if he wasnt talented at making prints. Speaking as someone learning the process of making them, silkscreens are time consuming and somewhat pricy to set up.

Rule of thumb is that, if you have to ask "is it art?", something has gone wrong in the art-making process.

Either way, art is, simply, anything with cultural value, IMO. But that's a cheap sociological answer...

Of course Chick Tracts are art. Nevermind the message and writing; at the very least the drawing is actually quite decent and expressive.

I like that answer, really.

edited 28th Sep '11 8:45:26 PM by Pykrete

I like USAF's answer, as well. Also Jethro's, of course, as it is, or appears to me to be, quite similar, if not an expanded version of the same principle.

Anyhoo, my actual opinion on art is that it's incredibly difficult to define. Do I go by authorial intent; is the presence of a message enough to elevate the status a work? Is a centuries-old portrait the encapsulation of the artist's muse or simply a commission for a somewhat wealthy but otherwise unremarkable client?