So, what is art? Is it restricted to the common categories - a painting, a poem, a sculpture, a cliche 5 minute film played in a loop on a wall of a gallery? Can new categories of art be created? Are there one-off things that are art, while similar things would not be? What's the criteria? Does it have to be technically brilliant, or intentionally created as art? If I see something as art, but the creator made it by accident or for a practical purpose, who is right? What if we can't ask the creator why they made it? "I know it when I see it" might be the only criteria, but that obviously implies that others might see differently.
And finally: does it matter? If the word "art" has indeed lost all meaning, does that change the way we interact with the world, or communicate with each other? How often does the average person communicate about "art" in a general sense, rather than simply what they enjoy, anyway?
It does for me. If "art" and "everything" become synonyms, I feel I've lost a valuable concept, and one I definitely use frequently.
Your anecdote about the "don't hack this" label is indeed clever and funny, and it's making a statement I can relate to. It's like hacking the event, in a way.
I don't see that anyone so far has argued that only a poem, a sculpture or a painting can be art. I'm surprised so many people in this conversation have made a logical connection between "I don't like snobbery like the Fountain/I don't think it's art" and "art must be pretty and only poetry/painting/music are acceptable". Why do people assume it's binary instead of a continuum between art and not-art?
I took away something entirely different from it (I took it as a given that the vending machine was indeed art because someone had proclaimed it to be so, and proceeded to think about what it might have to say within the context of the space and the event), but there you go.
The thing is that simply saying that something is "artless" isn't interesting - someone claimed it is art, and they did it for artistic purpose, and people are thinking about it as if it were art, so why isn't it? There's a big difference between saying that it's a stupid reaction to its context or that it's snobbish, and that it's artless.
I really enjoy witnessing the tagging and graffiti around the railways in the cities I've lived in, and feel there's definitely art in claiming the space in that way, but others feel it's spoiling the view and artless. Which of us is right?
I think I'm as entitled to claiming something is not art as the author who claims it is. For some creations, the consensus will side with one or the other. Nobody can put pigeon feces on display in a museum and force me to think of them as art, no matter what they think.
A lot of people don't consider found objects "real" art, by the way. I'm not alone in this.
Also, the time in 2006 when an artist sent a sculpture to be displayed in a gallery, with a tiny plinth to prop it up: the gallery rejected the sculpture and displayed the plinth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/15/arts.artsnews
I'm not saying you don't have a point, but where do you draw the line? Do you draw a line at all? I know I do.
> I dislike it or consider it snobbish and not worth my time (or even "not art").
Sounds like you had a reaction to the piece or at least the performance art of signing it off as art.