The following is an excerpt from my contribution to a class forum about art and material culture history.

It’s true that this really does bring rise to the question of ‘what makes art, art’ which I think we saw in the accompanying first half of htis course is a very difficult and nebulous concept. At that point we were trying to separate art/craft/design, but defining art itself isn’t much easier.

Some of Googles autofill suggestions:

• Art is the weapon
• Art is the cure
• Art is the handmaid of human good
• Art is the proper task of life
• Art is the solution to chaos

I’ve always loved this quote:

“Art is a reflection of human nature, he said. It is beautiful, and awful. It is simple, and it is incomprehensible. Art is the process of taking things apart to see how they work, and it is the process of breaking things to remind us how fragile they are. He sat on the edge of my couch, drinking a glass of water, and he said that we were creating an atmosphere that would retain the radiation reflecting off the surface of the earth. We were melting the edges of the ice caps, cooling down the northern seas. We were slowing the Gulf Stream, dramatically changing the way the environment behaved. He grabbed my shoulder and said, Isn’t art supposed to move you? Isn’t it supposed to shake you by the hair and say “Aren’t you afraid?”

He said art isn’t just for your benefit, or mine. Art can be a lesson that we leave behind, a horrible warning instead of a shining example. Art, he said, isn’t your little paintings and comic books. Art is the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.”

-Joey Comeau

I don’t think there’s a set rule, or even set of rules that we can apply to determine whether or not something is art. I think it’s something we decide together. So in a way, an artist declaring a urinal to be a piece of art, does make it so. Especially if people buy in to that. There’s not some guidebook that holds the answers for what can and can’t be art after all, it’s a human created construct. I don’t think it’s even necessarily the same for everyone. Maybe we should think of art as a quality instead of a construct. Like, beauty if in the eye of the beholder, and we know it has to do with aesthetics, symmetry, familiarity, composition, contrast etc. etc. but we also realize it’s not the same for everyone. Maybe art is in the eye of the beholder too.