How broad is your definition of art?

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lol yeah I thought this was going to be a nice maybe kind of fun discussion about art and what defines it...not people coming to express their thoughts only to be insulted by the guy who posted it. I can't even bring myself to report them because it's so pitiful how they are acting.

^Okey-dokey.
I shall part with a bit of wisdom:


"What you dislike or ridicule in others is actually within you/a part of you."

I have standards. I like that I have standards. I look around and I see the world rewarding "artists" for making trash that only constitutes as "art" for hipsters looking for a high horse to ride. If you want to support that, be my guest. I'll be over here, with my common sense, supporting artists, authors, and the like who display some semblance of intelligence with what they create.

You are acting just like the hipsters looking for a high horse to ride.

If someone has a more broad definition than you it means they like the shades of grey crap and supports worst aspects of pop culture and the crappiest art you can think of?

By your logic shades of grey isn't writing because it's bad...since apparently art isn't art if its bad. Something being bad or crappy doesn't make it something other than what it is.

Also everyone isn't going to agree on if something is crappy or not....that is a part of life. You can scream all day about how crappy something is to someone who disagrees and you'll never get anywhere. For instance I like the doors, my boyfriend thinks they suck....its hardly worth fighting about as there is plenty of music we both like plus disagreements can happen without fighting and insults in fact that is the best way.

I am sure if you had remained civil you would have found some common ground, instead of this thread disintegrating into arguing rather than discussing.

Books have a very specific definition: a bunch of paper pages, usually with writing in them, all bound together. Fifty Shades is, by definition, a book, but it's a bad book. Art isn't like that. The fact that it has no definition is what makes people take advantage of it and create trash, and try to pass it off as the same thing that Leonardo Da Vinci and Rembrandt did.
How can you people not see this? Modern art takes everything that artists have striven for over the years and stomps it into the ground. There are no standards for modern art, it's all about people with no real talent wanting to be called artists, so they make something worthless and tell everyone else that they're just not as smart as they are if they don't appreciate it. There's no effort, there's no quality, they just throw something together, tell a nice sounding story about how much it means to them, and demand praise and money for it. It's no different than a used car salesman spinning tall tales to make you think you're getting an amazing deal on an amazing car, only for you to find out that it's a piece of junk that can barely run.
Like I've said before: without the "artist" there to explain the "deeper meaning" to you, or at least a plaque, it loses all artistic value and becomes -you guessed it- garbage.
If you want to support this, go right ahead. I choose to fill my mind with things of worth and value.

And for the record, yes, I admit that I got carried away. I apologize for that. This is a frustrating topic for me because I legitimately can see the degradation of our society in the acceptance of this stuff as art.

Dude I'm a long time lurker here and I came on to say please get off these forums. I see you all over them and everything you say is just a terrible. This is a good place for people to go and talk to each other and your poisoning them. Please either delte your account or just stop posting it'd make it a lot better.

Art and art standards are all SUBJECTIVE. If we're talking about a specific skill, like portraits and photorealism, THEN we can set objective criteria for an artist's success. Spilling lima beans on the floor may/may not be art--it's subjective and also depends on what the artist is trying to accomplish.

I'm a musician and a poor visual artist--I give my kids tips on how to get beyond stick figures, but that's about it. On the music side, I'm a composer, and I even have a master's degree in music composition. Back in the day, I would toil intensely at making music in a more high modern style. Lots of dissonance, very well-thought mathematical structures, and occasionally even some aleatoric elements.

The truth is as much as I enjoy listening and performing this kind of thing, not many regular audience members do. And, honestly, sometimes you can get the same effect by slamming your fists on the piano keys without nearly the effort.

Compare with more conventional music. There are any number of tricks composers have and always have had to elicit specific emotional responses from audiences. Audiences eat this stuff up--they absolutely LOVE it. And with very little effort, composers can churn out these kinds of works quite rapidly.

To me, these kinds of compositions are commercialized junk, whereas my works are far superior. Sadly, MY works aren't the ones getting performances or making me any money. So which artistic direction is really best?

Answer: whichever one you like. There's not a right answer, aside from what best suits the artist's purpose. If you need money, junk art and music you can quickly and cheaply sell to the public is the way to go. If maintaining artistic integrity at the expenses of performances and building a large audience is acceptable, then spill all the lima beans you want.

Because these are subjective matters, it's hard to be an honest and fair judge. I'll like or dislike things based on my personal preferences and biases and keep my opinions to myself. Typically I just talk with my money as to whether an artist has merited my support.

we don't "need" a lot of platforms we have available to talk, or to think. but we like them! and if you don't like one, you can leave.
i also think you may not see (or enjoy seeing) the more whimsical intrigue of certain pieces you think are crap on the surface, just as you may not realize certain pieces that look good on the outside (and you enjoy looking at) are really crap on the inside.

i love janine antoni's "lick and lather". she molded 7 self portrait busts out of chocolate and 7 out of soap. they were technically realistic, until she licked the chocolate ones and washed herself with the soap ones. they were displayed as such in their dissolved forms. she also did a piece called "saddle" where she stood on her hands and knees with a raw hide draped over her, until it dried in the contours of her body. easy! you totally could have done that! but you didn't. you didn't think of it, or make arrangements for it, or talk about it, or have a whole body of work behind and ahead of it.

i had a really fun show called "draw with me", and all it consisted of was a gallery space covered in white paper (walls and floor) and a pile of crayons in the middle of the room. except the crayons were not factory standard but melted casts of my various small body parts (fingers, toes, nose, tongue, ears, nipples, lips, elbows, clit, teeth), and the whole idea was just letting the gallery visitors draw whatever they wanted with whatever pieces of me.

alginate molds are not hard to make. melting crayons into them is not hard to do. covering a room with paper does not take any special talent. having other people draw to make my piece a whole did not take any personal effort. you could have done it and ended up with the same appearance of my show even though you have no technical art skill. but you didn't. you didn't think of it. you didn't have an interest in artists like janine antoni, and bodily performance objects, and playground theory, and adult vs. child sanctioned spaces, and etfc. you didn't obtain a gallery space. or promote it. or spend weeks sticking your body parts into slimy alginate and mindlessly melting crayons into molds. it doesn't matter that you could have...at all. you didn't.

you have the freedom to use your free time and your free thought and to spend your freedom freely. if you care so much why not make your own gallery space and only accept work to your standards? or create a backwards time machine, but don't go to east asia, the middle east, africa, south america, north america before the 17th century, and no islands except for the great britain. and don't be from any of those dirty places! and for godsakes do not be a woman! oh, and be wealthy with high social status!! then you can dictate which representational governmental/religious/social/carnal art is made! bring back the european renaissance! eat delicious shoes all the time! you should sell your body to damien hirst!! or santiago sierra, if you're desperate.

Because he has no talent lol. he calls peoples art trash but all his books are trash. wow is that called irony I think?

Cross examination and common sense prevails here. The type of art I think is art relates to is in the illustrious sense, and not the dressing down of a moral code. A statue of Geoge Washington is art, Winston Churchill(our earlier pm not dog), is art, a moment in monumental wartime history, could be called anything from archivic work to art. The ones I tend to admire most, are Royal Heritage types and religious works of art, like The Last Supper and Leonardo Da Vinci's famous vaulted dome in the Sistine Chapel, I've never even been but I've studied it and can call it art.

All photography is art to me. When I use to smoke a lot of weed, good stuff, I realized that life is essentially math and that everything is moving at the speed of light and that there has to be an algorithm for our existence. Now, this is just my opinion, but it seems beautiful to me. So even a planter from Ikea or a family photo is art to me.

I came to that conclusion sober. When I smoke weed all I think about are munchies, lol.

Art = Visual or acoustic creation made as a representation of the creator's emotional state and experience at a certain point in time.

Everything can be considered art, if the intention of the artist is clear.

I am sure that there is a more precise definition of art

I think everything that exists, every single atom, is art. It all falls together perfectly on Planet Earth. Wow, I sound like I’m high