This comes about because people can't get past the idea that art is a natural gift, whereas it is in most part a learnable skill. My thinking on this changed after watching the Great Course's "How to Draw" lectures [1]. Dr. Brody explains most people don't realize that with effort and practice they can learn to draw effectively; that it's not something you're born with.

If you accept that it can be decomposed into small skills, which can be practiced, and aggregated to create effective art, then it can be tested and graded.

[1] https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/how-to-draw.html

Many people will say "I draw like a six-year old" but that's really because that's around the time when they stopped. Some people learn faster the skills faster than others but that's the same with math or science or any other skill.

The english alphabet is made up of 52 drawings that billions of people have learned. Everyone can draw them in some form because they practiced and it was required in school. Those same skills can be used in drawing anything. It's similar from being taught addition and then working your way up to calculus.

Having those skills doesn't necessarily produce great art but everyone can certainly learn how to draw or paint or sculpt. There's really no magic there.

When people say they can’t draw, they aren’t referring to being able to draw a simple geometric shape like a letter. They mean a portrait or a still life or landscape or something.

It's the same skill, just a different degree of practice. Depending on your skill level drawing involves a lot of simple geometric shapes and then using those shapes as a point of reference to draw the final result. The reason why art seems so difficult is because people don't see the intermediate steps which were taken, they only see the final result.

That's not what I'm saying. I understand they are saying they can't draw a portrait but what I'm saying is the only reason is because the skills usually weren't taught past a certain level. Those same geometric shapes are used in the construction of everything else.

a lot of artists and their fanbase think its a point of pride that they don't have formal education in art, as if they are a child prodigy

the customers they wish they could sell too would not consider that a point of pride

that prodigy should go to a prestigious art school, for the techniques or network alone

My art classes barely involved any teaching at all. We were basically showed what type of art we should create and then were told to produce one good art piece per over the course of a month. Obviously it doesn't work that way. First of all we are standing on the shoulders of giants. 99% of the time this means reading books and following their instructions. Second, your first attempt at anything is going to completely fail. You need practice, practice, practice. Your second attempt will be better than your first but we never got that chance. Your third will be even better than the second and so on. The way lessons should be structured would be to draw at least 5 small pictures every lesson with the expectation that you throw them away. Then at the end of the month, you could just pick your best one and show that one to your parents instead.

At the same time, putting a urinal in an art gallery is considered a significant piece of art history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

It is more complicated. That urinal in that gallery at that time by that artist had great meaning. Just as why painting soup cans can be great art, context always matters more than paint.

But what was the meaning? The artist's meaning was that art - or what we think of as art - is not actually possible, so a urinal is just as much "art" as anything else is. The art critics (don't know about the gallery) thought that it was pretty, and so they accepted it as art, which horrified the artist, because they completely missed his point.

Source: "Saving Leonardo", by Nancy Pearcey.

Or he was saying that he thought all the other art there was trash, that a urinal was more interesting. It was also placed on its back, an unussual orientation. So it was a statement on perspective too.

I tend to think that some of the issue is that people use the word "art" to refer to things that are different concepts.

I tend to feel that for something to qualify as art it has to have both philosophical merit and aesthetic merit (although I don't think the aesthetic necessarily has be be beauty). In my opinion, artists that emphasize almost exclusively the philosophical aspects of their art would be more accurately termed activists or political cartoonists; while artists who focus purely on the aesthetic aspect would be more accurately termed something like artisans.

However, that's definitely heavy into the realm of opinion and even then there are definitely huge gray areas.

>>> artists that emphasize almost exclusively the philosophical aspects of their art

Like writers? Poets? There are many types of art that are almost entirely philosophical. What else can they emphasize?

Under the perspective that I'm proposing, both prose and poetry could be equally philosophical; however, poetry also incorporates some sort of aesthetic features such as a rhyme scheme, a pattern of syllables, rhythm of stressed syllables, etc. Therefore, poetry would be "art" in the sense that I am talking about but prose would not be.

However, I that this example brings up some interesting points:

- One of the problems that I think underlies these discussions is that many people think that something must be "art" in order to be profound/valuable/important/expressive. However, I'd argue that things like prose philosophy and oral storytelling can be equally profound/valuable/important/expressive.

- Like I said before, there are definitely gray areas. I just argued that poetry was art but prose is not due to poetry's use of aesthetic features. However, it can't a story incorporate significant aesthetic features both in the form of techniques like metaphor and in the use of sumptuous descriptions?

- I think the previous point might suggest that there can be different degrees to which or different senses in which something is art. For example, we might say that poetry is art relative to a prose novel but that the novel is art relative to a science paper. Or we might say that a beautifully engraved beer stein is not art in the sense that it does not have any philosophical meaning but it is art in the sense that it goes beyond the simply utilitarian to incorporate the aesthetic.

My brother went to art college, and it was more or less the same there.