Art? What's that?

Do you know what art is?

Is it this?

Or this?

Or what about this banana taped to a wall!

Or even this???

Yet someone out there treasured this as a masterpiece, and who am I to say they're wrong? (tbh i could never produce something that good)

What are the boundaries around the concept of art - beyond just the feeling you get when you instinctively recognize something as art, you know like watching Lebron on the court.

Tolstoy once defined art as a three-step process: feeling, recalling, and expression. By this measure, perhaps anything can be art if created with the intention of communicating an emotional experience. But then where do we draw the line? Is Suda the elephant, painting images in Thailand, creating art? What about the Japanese puffer fish that spends a week making sand patterns to attract a mate?

But away with the objectiveness - traditionally the recognized categories of art are painting, sculture, architecuture, literature, music, theater, and film, with film being the only medium that hasn't been around for thousands of years. There is only one philosophy I take to art, without having done much consideration or having much credibility, I say that if everything can be art, than does everything really qualify as art?

I also say that art comes from the human condition, not necessarily out of suffering (as some part of the blog said but I forgot), but in the sense that even generative ai patching up pieces or even coming up with something coherent obviously doesnt have the semantics. Art is there to express layers of feeling that can't be simply given through words or even a picture.

Freedom to express also means the freedom to put up bs and have people believe it (Fetty Wap?????) I feel like you can delude yourself into anything being art in this day and age. At this point everyone can just pointlessly argue about their own boundaries of what qualifies as art, but in the end we know that valorant is our favorite art form ;)