What is art? The best answers are useless, flat conversation killers as from Tolstoy and his type, who say art is something that infects the person beholding it with someone else's emotions. Such conversation-killers are best because pickier definitions of what art is get silly and tedious. Obviously the word, like 'love,' 'beauty,' or 'fun,' means different things for different people.
Obviously - and yet silly art critics tediously struggle to quantify what art is. But they have a good economic reason to do so. If they don't produce more than popular truisms like 'art is a thing that makes you feel,' why would we listen to them, rather than to our own inclinations, when it comes to deciding what art is good and what art is bad?
So for decades, art critics have danced around the question of quality in art by plugging the illusion that the artistic value of visual spectacles is related to a lack of popular appeal - plugging the illusions that few things are art and few people are artists, that most things and people are not art or artists, and that they, the critics, can educate us about the difference.
Are you touched by Rothko's paintings? Congratulations, my friend; you're far more sensitive than those dimwitted thousands who cried at the end of Old Yeller and who don't care what abstract expressionism is. Now consider Marcel Duchamp's signed urinal and tell me if you're not still special.
Art critics use such pseudo-elitist pandering within their industry to hawk art commodities as shamelessly as ad companies use images of sexual adequacy to sell beer. The results are mind-boggling, like Damien Hirst scoring a reported million pounds for a big copy of his son's Young Scientist Anatomy set, or Jeff Koons getting almost $2 million for copying the Pink Panther.
In both cases, the buyers may have made a good investment. If the Bigger Fools Theory holds true and if the critical system works as intended, such works will only appreciate in value. So the world of modern art is one of jaw-droppingly retarded and high stakes, of 'new clothes' on an emperor who's hung like a grasshopper. This makes its reaction to the graffiti artist Banksy a little extra interesting.
We see one side of this reaction in champagne-socialist comma-orgies like the Guardian, where Jonathan Jones panics that Banksy's popularity represents the Fall of Art. He grumbles that people who enjoy Banksy are also people who think art critics like him are either fools or grifters for admiring the likes of Damien Hirst. He even pricelessly uses the word 'philistine' - the professional art critic's equivalent of "Oh yeah? Well, SHUT UP!" In short, he sweats in print.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!