What do you see as art?
Is art made to "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable"
or do you think art has to be "pretty" and "well made"?

Personally I feel art is anything and everything when looked at the right way.
The only thing i beg to differ that is not art is most modern art. It annoys me that a flat color can be art if given the right title and story. The art basically then becomes the story and if that is not known then its like "what is this" even so I feel the story was thrown in last minute. I had to make a "Modern art" thing for an art class before, but forgot. So last minute I took a recently emptied pack of gum and glued the last wrapper in it and titled it "The Beauty in Litter" then made up some thrown together story about how trash can be made into something "beautiful" rather than thrown away... I got a B (bad grammar and spelling) but that still made me want to shack my head... that wasn't art that was thrown together with out thought.

In my friend's school in his painting class the final was due soon and this girl didn't do it because she forgot about it. So right before class she went outside, grabbed a stick, painted it red, and put it on the white canvas. Not only did she pass with flying colors, but was complemented in front of the whole class by the teacher that it was the best piece he has veer seen in all of his classes.... That crud just angers me to the core.

Sorry for the rant, but what is your opinion on what art is?

I tend to go with the actual definition. It is a mastery of a skill. A lot of the artists you are probably thinking of for Modern art, though I'm pretty sure a good bit of what you're thinking of is contemporary art as well, do have those skills. The problem is most can't recognize how they are actually being applied. Like how most would think Pollock is just flinging paint at a canvas which isn't true.

In order to explain modern art you would have to get the paint purity movement.

And yes a lot of it will be bs that is also a point. Technical skill doesn't pay nor does it produce.

I think art is in the eye of the beholder.

Just like Zombie Pixie's avatar! :D

*runs away*

Art is a creation which conveys emotion or thought.

Originally Posted by The Wandering Poet

Art is a creation which conveys emotion or thought.

Goodness, Poet, sometimes I think you're like, an erudite me or something. This is what I was thinking.

tl;dr

I think the best art captures a feeling or an idea in its most complete, most simple, purest form (I do realize those things could be seen as contradictory). It's elemental. So ... art would be mastery of a skill for sure-- and to me, that skill is a) expressing things that most people can't express and/or b) expressing things in a way few if any other people have done before.

(I just realized that was stolen from some person's writing advice-- "Say something new in an old way or say something old in a new way.")

Anyway, I doubt most people will agree on how they feel about a particular piece of what some other person calls "art," but I guess that's okay. I think art isn't just made by the person who created it but also by the people who calls it "art."

I still vividly remember a class in American literature I took that spent 45 minutes discussing William Carlos Williams's really short poem about the wheelbarrow. They turned it into a metaphor for the American way of life, and at the time I thought it was really stupid, but not too long ago, I remembered it and thought about some of the interesting things people thought of because they read that poem, and *shrugs* I'm cool with it.

Something which conveys nothing is not art. It may be an image, but it is not art.

Like take a childhood drawing for example. To you or me... we likely couldn't care less about scribbles on a piece of paper. But to a mother... it's art.

Eck... taking a poem and pulling it apart D: I hate when people do that to concrete poems. Had that happen in my school all the time. Teacher went on about "This rock symbolizes this and means this that and this" but it's just a damn rock...
I used poetry to make images... and that image gave the symbols not the words.

Edit - Also the phrase "What is art? Baby don't draw me, don't draw me, no more" pops in my head every time I see this thread title XD

Hahah yeah. I hear you.

Pulling apart concrete things used to bother me a ton, but now... I don't know. It's like haiku.

That is a wonderful association.

Still bothers me... as my style is almost completely concrete in one form or another...

Ah, okay. Well, that makes sense, then.

So you really don't like people seeing things you didn't intend for them to see in your work?

Moreso I don't like that my writing didn't convey the image right :(

Ah. So what if someone sees what you intended to convey but then also sees something else that you had not intended? Would that bother you?

So long as it's at least mildly related no...

Like let's take mona lisa for example... she has no eyebrows. Why? Well, the sensible reason discovered by x-ray was that he had painted eyebrows previously but had painted over them and never added them again. (not 100% sure as I haven't seen the x-ray myself though)
But so many people speculated he was gay, he was painting himself as a girl, when really she could have just shaved her eyebrows between painting sessions...

Mildly related, huh? Oh, man, could I have fun with that. Everything is connected to everything else if one looks hard enough. Ever play the game "Read My Mind"? Or the six clicks game with Wikipedia?

Why did he paint over them? Was there an eyebrow-related catastrophe?

Was it a unibrow?

The sensible answer just adds more questions, I think... :-P

WAIT WAIT WAIT DID DA VINCI MEET THE ELEVENTH DOCTOR OF DOCTOR WHO AND PAINT OUT THE EYEBROWS AS AN HOMAGE? I HAVE TO KNOW...

Haha I think the whole gay/male model thing has evidence in things other than the eyebrows. I mean, for being beautiful or whatever, she does kind of look androgynous. Some speculate that the model was actually Leonardo's male assistant, given striking similarities between the nose and mouth in that painting and in Saint John the Baptist. Or, so I've heard...

Ugh... my poetry teacher did that... it was sort of annoying... XD

Probably started the face over and forgot...?

Well, that would make sense... it'd probably be pretty hard to find a lady willing to sit there for hours...

Yeah, I think quite possibly every poetry teacher does that. It's like a blood oath, or something.

Hah yeah, that would be great. He starts painting a dude, goes back to it later and is all, "Wait, was I painting a man or a woman?"

Or something.

Oh, yes, I've heard being paid is an excellent motivation for doing nothing for hours on end... :-)

Well take a dudes face and try and draw a ladies face out of it and you'll probably have a skewed middle ground right?

Yes well unfortunately so I've heard most artists were poor... just like now >.<

Yeah, I could see that happening...

Ugh so depressing. I mean, I understand why art doesn't take precedence over basic survival and all, but still... It uplifts the soul, and I wish it could support the people who care about it before they died instead of making them famous and potentially rich afterward.

Well that's another thing about art... it's not valuable until you're dead >.<"
Then the price breaks the roof...

Oh, I don't know; there always seem to be a few great artists that somehow manage to be popular.

But hey, at least the rest of us don't have to worry about getting rained on...

*doesn't read up*

I need to edit my statement;
I still believe that art is in the eye of the beholder.
I just think that anyone who thinks that Picasso's oddly shaped art needs their beholder-y eyes checked.

*'s out*

Wait... what?

Are you saying Picasso's work IS art or ISN'T?

Oh that guy... honestly I don't really depict that as "art"... I wouldn't hang that stuff on my wall... seems more like something a scrapbooking mom would make with her kids

Oh, I don't know about that. I kind of like Picasso.

I know a lot of his stuff is weird-looking, and all, but he told stories with it, he looked at things from different angles. He took the way people normally see things and pretty much forced people to reevaluate it.

Maybe I'm more in love with his concepts than his art, come to think of it. I like the idea of breaking things into their basic shapes. I like the idea of looking at something at different places in time all at once. I like the idea of looking at things through the haze of emotion-- of trying to depict the mind of the viewer of a person or object rather than copying the object itself.

Does that make what Picasso does science or something instead of art?

If he told stories beside his art then just the painting is an incomplete piece of art then?

Well, he did write poetry, but what I meant was that he told stories in his paintings.