what is art? who am i?

[keryx]

Is there a global, universal definition of art in your mind?

Is that definition somehow apart from Art or high art or whatever one might call it?

NPR was talking to some guys yesterday morning. Some relatively random New Yorker and some other dude who was an art professional of some sort (historian? critic? professor?). The random guy was very certain that the Christo thing in Central Park wasn't Art (and you could tell he capitalized it in his head) and the professional art dude was very much of the opinion that there is no such thing as Art v. art.

I tend to agree with the latter. Art (no special caps) is pretty much anything that is created to move you. And anything created to move you pretty much does, in some way, if you actually pay attention to it. Christo's work, while pretentiously described, is arresting. End of story, I think.

I thought there was a weird class aspect to this at first, that the Man On The Street was all "that's not Art!" and the professor wasn't. But I think it was more a reactionary v. not reactionary thing, now that I've seen the Today Show (which is basically a media stand-in for the MOTS) getting all "yay, art" about the installation.

Comments

[bizarrojack.livejournal.com]

This argument is driven by people's desire to disinclude things that are good enough. It would be nice to say "I love art" and mean "I love all art," in that fantasy-land sort of way. Not all art is "good," by which I mean "not good to me." You just can't please everyone, sometimes due to a fair assessment, and sometimes due to a total lack of understanding. Art, Romance, and um, ethnic food all seem to suffer this sort of discussion, all based on the presupposed shared value that it's all good, and it just isn't.

Of course it's art, although I will permit people to say that it's really shitty. Don't get me wrong, I wrote this before looking up what it is. It might also be really good, and the people who think it's shitty could be a bunch of morons.

[bizarrojack.livejournal.com]

ugh.... "disinclude things that AREN'T good enough."

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Funny you should say that - I had forgotten the part of the MOTS interview where he went slightly apeshit talking about how if anything could be art, we'd never know what was good and what wasn't. There was a definite emphasis in his speech on needing some sort of great all-agreed definition of Art, cause otherwise - EGADS! - people would have to just accept the range of individual opinions.