What is art?

Art: The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture.

People have different ideas of what constitutes art, rating some forms of art more highly than others.

When I visit art galleries and museums I’m always much more interested in pre-Victorian paintings and tend to skip past the modern art sections because I don’t rate modern art as highly as classical art. There are two reasons for this; modern art tends to be quite simplistic, representing some hidden meaning behind splodges of colour I think even a child could produce (and even animals in some cases, have.) If I read the blurb along side the artwork, I always end up thinking to myself that the artist has just made up a metaphor after the paining has been finished, in order to make it appear more thought-provoking than it actually is, rather than the other way around.

Secondly I’m very impressed with extremely detailed, life-like portraits of classical art which have taken immense time, effort and skill while modern art tends to reject realism. Back in the days classical art was produced, photography didn’t exist so there was a need for life-like portraiture to capture what important people or scenes looked like. In modern days of photography however, I question whether it is as necessary and impressive to produce a life-like painting when we can just take a photograph of the object which will be even more realistic. So in a sense, modern art is producing abstract concepts that aren’t possible to reproduce with modern technology, possibly making it more unique in a way.



What about film and photography, can they also be forms of art? What about digital paintings and moving animation? Should there be a distinction between hand-drawn animation and computer generated animation, or are they equally art just the same? I think in certain cases depending on the intention, photography is definitely a form of art, as is moving film, especially animated film. For me, although computer animation can produce more impressive effects, knowing that every single frame of an animation has been drawn by hand really amazes and impresses me because it’s much more time consuming and arguably more skilled. There is something much more magical about watching a hand drawn rather than computer produced animation, that I can’t really put my finger on.

Summary: What do you regard as art? What don’t you regard as art? Do you rate some forms of art more highly than others? And why?


Some forms to think about:
Classical
Modern
Pottery
Sculpture
Plasticine models
Sock puppets
Film
Photography
Hand-drawn animation
Computer animation
Digital images

LOD Edit: Added Tags

I consider real art to be creations that can influence my emotions and paint a vivid picture in my mind.

Btw, how could ANYBODY consider those beginning images art? Especially the first image...it's just a *bleep*ing red square. That's not art in any way shape or form. I could recreate the same image in five seconds with a marker.

This is madness!

Art means something different to everyone. Of course, I'd also consider art to be just an interesting picture that you look at for longer than ten seconds. Crap like "The Red Square" or "Where I take a piss" doesn't have anything special about it whatsoever.

Of course, this is all opinion. If you honestly see something amazing out of a bunch of random lines then good for you...

I love this question. My professors used to ask us all the time.

I used to not like the works that you posted that you said you don't like. I used to think art was anything made only during the renaissance or before. I used to not like modern art at all. I didn't "get" it. And I looked at it and thought it was boring or "I could do that". And then I started becoming interested in the stories behind the art. It wasn't always about what you were seeing but rather what you weren't. It's about how it makes you feel and what the artist was trying to say. And that is when those same works of art that I hated become some of my favorites.

When asked "what is art". There is only one definite answer:

Art is simply anything you want it to be as long as you put a thoughtful meaning behind it.

quote Willow Vampire

Spoiler:Black Square

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Looks a lot like this album cover to me.

There's a lot I don't consider art, but I've got no real examples right now. I never liked the post-impressionism work of Paul Gauguin, but I remember my teacher in school last year loving his work. Vision After the Sermon is pretty awful I reckon.

Stuff I do love is mostly to do with album covers. The Mars Volta have some of the most exceptional album covers I've ever seen. He hasn't done the art for the new album, but Jeff Jordan's work is really appealing to me. I like anything 'weird'. Eggman and my personal favourite of his are two examples of what to expect from him.

Another artist I love is Alex Grey, who does a lot of Tool's artwork. An example or two.