<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(chumloofah @ Aug 2 2007, 09:03 PM) [snapback]302491[/snapback]</div>
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<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Sebatianos @ Aug 2 2007, 07:18 PM) [snapback]302471[/snapback]
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First off, we should all know what ART is. The most simple and still valid explenation I could ever find was that "art is way of creating something without the intent of having material gain from it."[/b]
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I've always had a hard time pinning down what makes art.
I don't think it's mandatory that art and product be totally separate, though.
Almost every artist in history has made money from their art, or someone else has made money from it, apart from a few outsiders like that hobo in the US that had a weird compulsion to build a tower out of cardboard boxes.
At the moment I'm standing behind the delightful "Art is anything that was deliberately created to be of no use to anyone" theory.
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Neither of these definitions of Art allow for the vast body of stuff that is found in art museums.
Art can only exist when, as a group, humans have enough spare time to specialise and are freed of the tyranny of having to hunt/gather/grow your own food. This pretty much eliminates ". . . not for material gain . . .", as an artist must have a way to support himself, and if it is not his art, he has little time to produce any. Just about every piece of art has some purpose, and any piece that does not is probably nothing more than the endpiece of performance art.
Art is an indirect way of communicating. We can have a great philosophical debate about what it means to be human, or we can watch Bladerunner. We could talk about the importance of free will, or we could read A Clockwork Orange. We can rail about how TV's race to the bottom causes us all to become less intelligent, or we can read Fahrenheit 451. Paintings are images that convey mood and sensation. Sure, you have all heard about how Canada is a huge place, but looking at the works of The Group of Seven can really drive the point home.
Propaganda posters are Art. Some years ago, there was even a touring collection of North Korean motivational posters.
Art without purpose is music without sound (a funny-once joke, at best). The simplest way to recognize a bad piece of art is if you cannot derive any meaning of the piece without knowing the title.