I feel that if you reject or ignore the critics and the elaborate descriptions, you can appreciate art as you like. (And by extension consider whatever you like as art.)

There is much art being done outside of "erudite" circles. But still, all art is dependant on the appreciation of others.

I drew nude self portraits as part of therapy to help me recover from childhood sexual abuse.

Some of them made me cry in relief and help me put down terrible, terrible baggage.

I think some of those images were shared with one or two people. It's been a lot of years and I really can't remember (how many/if all were shared and other details) because sharing them or not sharing them apparently didn't make much impression on me, but I do still remember breaking down and crying as the shackles of the chains in my soul broke and fell away and turned to dust because of the act of making the drawing.

I'm pretty sure you can make art purely for yourself and never show it to anyone else.

You can make something, but what, then, makes it art?

Or, to put that another way: if there is only one animal alive in a forest, and that animal produces noise intentionally, but has no organ for sensing noise, have they made a “sound”?

Some words are only meaningful in the context of interpersonal communication. “Art” is, IMHO, one of them. Without an observer secondary to the artist, the question “is this art” has a NULL answer. Not an arbitrary one — a lack of one. Because encoded in the meaning of the word “art” is the assumption that you’re asking someone else that question.

My working definition of "art": that which is created for the sufficient purpose of being perceived.

This definition does not require the audience be not the artist. If one creates an instance for the sole purpose of being perceived by one's self alone, that is still art.

My thought process here was that that is not a useful definition, because all the extra stuff this definition lets in, is not stuff people would usually agree to call “art” / understand your meaning if you referred to it as “art.”

Let me try my analogy again: if you’re the last human alive, and you invent a bunch of words used for thinking to yourself, are those a “language”? Or are they merely a verbal shorthand or formalism or mnemonic for your thought processes?

IMHO, the word “language” only has a meaning/application in the context of two or more agents speaking. It is a protocol to allow agents without exactly the same mind to share thoughts, by putting those thoughts into a standardized schema separate from one’s own internal mental schema. If only you (or you and emulated copies of yourself) are communicating, then you won’t need such a separate model—you can just transmit the internal schema data structures directly.

As counter-argument, I reference the Voynich Manuscript: clearly a language is used to share thoughts, even though only the author (presumably) understood it.

I come to this definition of "art" precisely because so much of what is deemed "art" today "is not stuff people would usually agree to call 'art'", such as the "artist" shuffling around a pile of salt whilst on his knees for hours each day. Current art has done a great deal to eviscerate any sense of meaning (despite the pages of explanation accompanying every piece thereof), leaving me with my working definition: that which is made for the sufficient purpose of being perceived. I don't like the definition, being devoid of any aspect regarding improving the human condition, but that's what I'm left with.

> The Voynich Manuscript: clearly a language used to share thoughts, even though only the author (presumably) understood it.

The Voynich Manuscript has been referred to as a "personal shorthand" rather than a "language" quite often. "Language" is a specific term, and "being used to exchange ideas between people" seems to be part of the definition as people care to use it.

We do call large systems of grammar+vocabulary invented by one person "con-langs", which suggests they are "languages" — but we only call them that when those languages have usage guides published, such that other people could theoretically attempt to speak them. Before that happens, we don't really have a term for them. They're private thoughts in the creator's head. Do you need a term for that?

(What do you call hypothetical semantics underlying the random runic scripts used to decorate buildings in sci-fi movies, that only the authors know the meaning of — if there ever was a meaning at all? Intuitively, "language" is not quite the right term there. Even if there is a fictional language in that fictional setting, the representative samples of writing aren't necessarily valid samples of it — especially if the authors never bothered to actually construct a language for those samples to be sampled from.)

> the "artist" shuffling around a pile of salt whilst on his knees for hours each day

My argument there is that a lot of people are conflating something being "bad art" with that thing being "not art." But they don't do it all the time. They still use "art" to mean "art", as well as using it to mean "good art." They'll use "artful" or "evocative" to talk about "good art", but they'll use "artistic" to talk about any "art", good or bad.

Art, like writing or music, is an act of communication. Art is seemingly described as "good" when it's powerful; that is, when it successfully communicates something, perhaps impactfully.

That has nothing to do with aesthetics, of course. Awful images can be good art, if they're powerfully awful images.

Bad art, then, is powerless: it fails to communicate. But this still doesn't mean it's not art.

Art isn't opacity; doing a really bad job of making art doesn't make the thing less art. It makes it lesser art — lesser according to some societal ranking function — but that's not the same thing as becoming less like what people mean when they say "art."

People who are speaking unintelligibly (perhaps because they're very drunk, say) are still speaking, rather than "making noises." They're still attempting to communicate an idea through the medium of sound to others, and that's what makes that noise they're producing "speech." Intelligibility doesn't come into the question of "is it speech." It only comes into the question of "is it a successful act of speech."

A human born in the wild, though, with no exposure to other sapient minds capable of engaging in exchange of ideas, isn't "speaking" when they make mouth noises. They don't even have the concept of "speech." They're not attempting to communicate any ideas to others. There are no others.

Art is, AFAICT, the same.

This is why i concentrate on "professional art". It's a commercial endeavor. Often, it excludes the creator.

Art sure is more valuable once the artist is dead, from a dealers perspective.

As for what is "art" in general? Whatever you want it to be!

If you have to buy a book or go to school to figure it out, you just engaged in commerical / professional art, as a buyer. Back to commercial art we go.

Why is any observer outside the artist required?

Do you not use language to describe the world to yourself and help you understand it? Can you not do the same thing with art?

Edit: After more consideration, these sorts of means of internal communication might something like internal monologues or visualization and function quite differently for different people.

This ignores a major point that the audience of that art does not need to be contemporary.

If a masterpiece painting is created by a blind artist, never seen by anyone including himself for 500 years. Then it is discovered after 500 years. What is the status of this art through this timeline?

Art and beauty remain what they are irrespective of an audience.

Now, whether something is really art or beautiful, and who decides that are entirely different questions..

> What i find boring with western art is that it is completely dependent on the critic and the discourse statement, in text, that must accompany any "serious" work of art.

I live near a large art museum that has, for each piece, a plaque with the name, artist, year, and at most a paragraph or two of usually-historical context (and sometimes not even that).

There is no professional art imo, the professionalism makes it design. Art and design are opposites. In its purest form the former is about expressing yourself, the latter about resonating with others. If you create "art" with the intention for it to resonate with others (e.g. to make money selling it) you're designing.

>The writer of the article is selling a monetary-driven agenda

Did we read entirely different articles? The one posted above is very much a creed against money-driven fads among artists.

The writer is writing on "what is art", while being a gallery represented professional artist (i.e. sold his art in the system) and a paid professor(again, professional system player).

It's brand awareness building, also known as self-promotion. "See, I'm in the racquet, but I'm not like the others!" He went on to publish a book on the subject, 3 years later. [ source : gallery statement, wikipedia ]

He is pushing art as politics and himself as the arbiter, all while preaching in the royal "We". Like I wrote, how tedious.

Any piece of work that does not speak for itself, i dont consider art.

The works of the great masters can be appreciated even by children. They speak for themselves.

Be careful here, because even those that seem to speak for themselves require (cultural) context to appreciate fully. Take Rembrandt's portrait of St. Bartholomew. It's unquestionably a skilled production, and aesthetically pleasing. But it's also, on its face, just an old guy holding a knife.

If you learn the guy's name from the plaque next to the frame, and you know the word "saint" and are familiar with the reasons that title is applied, that probably gives you some impression that the knife is not going to be used to eat supper. (It's interesting to imagine viewing the and not knowing these things, in my opinion.) But only if you actually know St. Bart's (horrific) story do you understand the look on his face and really grasp the depth of Rembrandt's depiction.

This same problem applies to modern->contemporary art. In some cases the cultural context is, ironically, "people thought art should be produced for its own sake", which is harder to engage with if you happen to also not like the surface aesthetic. But it doesn't stop the artifacts from being art.

Well, I'm not an art collector or have any deep interest in art. Partly because I'm ignorant, with a dash of stupid and very broke.

That being said I can appreciate workmanship, artisanal detail and peserverance of craftsmanship - whether a person builds a table, lays bricks, sculpts statues, or paints like Rembrandt. Where lifelong sweat and blood drips on a piece of work, it leaves an indellible mark of both talent and absurb obsession.

It's hard to get that feeling in abstract art. It feels like a my toddler niece lashed out on a canvas and some pompus grey beard is telling me about emotional turmoil being expressed on a canvas. That turns my stomach. It's elitist and my eyes are too poor or it's just crap.

The argument ofcourse becomes photorealism isn't art. My very ignorant view says art should capture the moment. While imagery/photography should capture a moment.

By that definition seeking snake oil is also anything snake oil is because you are selling it as “not snake oil”.

Plenty of art is sold on the basis of the work it’s self. But, that doesn’t qualify as high art. The difference between what you’re paying 5k vs 500k is almost completely about the story around the art not the actual art on it’s own merits.

You just repeated what I said