Response to Jake's "What is Art?"

            My first high school art teacher told the class something on the first day of school: everything is art.  No one really took that seriously, we just filed that information in the back of our heads for future tests or exams.  Not until my freshman year of college did I truly understand the phrase “everything is art”.  There is an art to creating a pen, a shirt, a rug, and a chair just like there is an art to making a beautiful painting, photograph, drawing, or sculpture.  While most people do not fully appreciate every object in their environment, each and every object was designed by an artist, such as the blue chairs with desks made by Emilio Ambasz and Giancarlo Piretti.

            You are right, Jake, “most people have different opinions about what should or should not be considered art”.  Everyone has their own opinion about art.  For those less educated in the arts they hear the word “art” and imagine the Mona Lisa or a painter’s pallet and a paintbrush.  For some, art is fleeting and takes place in the moment, like a theatrical or musical performance, while others’ ideas of art are limited to 2 dimensional images on paper and canvas.  The concept of art is similar to the concept of a hero; they are both relative terms.  A hero is determined not by his character or strength; he is determined by someone recognizing him as his “hero”.  One cannot be a hero without having a “heroee” to say “he is my hero”.  Art is not art when no one can recognize it as art.  While that seems contradictory to my first message, everything is art, the truth of the matter is there will always be someone somewhere out there who can look at an image that no one else likes and see something good in it.  There will always be a handful of nut jobs who love the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, likewise there will always be someone to love every terrible piece of artwork ever made.  Everyone has a different taste in everything.  My dad prefers funny Hallmark cards while my mother enjoys heartfelt letters.

            You bring up a valid point about art that “it is almost unanimously agreed upon that it needs to express something or have an emotional impact”.  We try to find meaning in artwork and the most famous pieces we are shown come with notes about a certain message in the piece or collection.  However we have no way of knowing if these analyzed messages are really what the artists were going for when they made their work.  Maybe Jackson Pollock just got bored and really liked annoying art critiques in his time, we have no way to really know his goal for making art.  Like I said before, everyone has a different taste in everything.  Some may experience the feeling of peace when viewing Morandi’s still lifes while others are bored and insulted by their lack of proper compositions.  You’re right, no one can be objective about an art piece because an artwork can be expressive for some and not for others.  It’s all a matter of opinion, so there is no one person that can judge what art is good or bad.

            I believe that as students studying art we do not study what is art and what is not, we study what is good art.  Good art is just another phrase explaining one’s opinion of a work.  We can break a piece down into different aspects and judge them based on set guidelines such as line quality, realism, composition, etc., but we seem to learn most about the people that break the rules of art.  I agree that there is value in discussing the credibility of a work of art, and I also agree that there is no point to become aggressive about art upon which people may disagree.

            It is easy to rant about this subject; some say you must follow the rules, others say some rules can be broken, and still others say that only those who learn to break rules in new ways are true artists.  No single opinion is correct, when you take all the differing opinions and add them up everything is given the status of art.  I think what matters most isn’t what our professors tell us is art, but what we view as meaningful to us.  You can look at Mondrian’s work for a few seconds and walk away bored, then look at Leonardo DaVinci’s paintings and feel inspired.  All that matters is how you relate to artwork that inspires you.  At the end of the day you won’t even care about Mondrian’s work because Leonardo’s work is what spoke to you.