What Is Art?

If you experience art through the citadel of academia or spend any time with serious artists, listening to how they converse and digesting the ideas that rattle around in their heads you'll quickly recognize the complexity of the art world. Genres, styles, code-words, good and bad, right ways and wrong ways. Indeed, art is complicated.

It's also mostly bullshit.

The role of popular artist appeals to narcissistic personalities because it's something that can generate positive identity as well as an aura of special skills that therefore magnify the uniqueness and importance of the artist. This is a boat everybody wants to be on since people want to be congratulated and sought after. Yet it loses its value when anyone can be an artist, hence the creation of those widespread cliques and elitist clubs. Special interpretations and ways of being an artist are meant to exclude the majority in order to magnify the minority; the inveterate search for a monopoly through the power of definition. The clique that can define what art actually is to the masses gains enormous power and coveted prestige. Today's art movements are no better than others, the artists are no better either, they just hold a very transitory monopoly.

"It [conceptual art] is the product of over-indulged middle-class bloated egos who patronise real people with fake understanding," proclaimed Ivan Massow, ex-chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Given that the only genuine "concept" in conceptual art is the alliance of ego and money, this is not a surprising turn of events.

All art, be it 30,000 year old cave drawings in France or a crucifix in a jar of urine, has a crucial common element - the evocation of emotion, the conveyance of a message. Art is communication and superior art is superior communication. Everything else is icing on the cake. Beauty, colors, form, style, all just accessories designed to enhance the spread and popularity of the ideas ensconced within the art. Everyone can be an artist, but the best artists have a superior ability to convey ideas and emotions.

I think beauty can only be generated by nature and emulated by the artist. True beauty resides within the wispy colors of a nebula cloud, the intricate veins of a green leaf, the glistening eyes of one's beloved. It's not about style or training or name or prestige or how trendy your glasses are, it's about evoking emotion and ideas. Art is simply a vehicle, a means of conveying a message or emotion, but it also contains significant subjective qualities.

But ultimately art should be more than just a source of passive bemusement, it should be a participatory activity. When art is a recipe rather than a static monstrosity collecting dust in pretentious museums, art where the viewer is part of the process, they become artists as well. Not only does this dissolve the repulsive elitism staining modern art but it becomes entertaining and enlightening too because there's nothing holy or mystical about art or the qualities an artist must possess. This is the most nihilistic and democratized art movement I can think of because it has no set genre and no clique is defining what's acceptable. Every artist creates what they are best at creating and what's most appealing to them. Paint the walls, post on the Internet, wear it on your shirt...it really doesn't matter.