The art that I love - 12

What is art in the first place? Is something that a celebrity made on canvas automatically art? What makes a creation actual art? Why do I get when I google female artist always a singer? Is there no added value to be presented first when one creates something really good like art?

The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. That's a simple enough explanation of what art is, isn't it? Or is it?

Could we just be trading in one set of values for another this last century of ours? I mean, take a very day commercial and compare it to anything one might find in an art gallery today. Where does one see the most applayed skill and imagination?

Beauty and emotional power. I'm sure that one could get a consensus on what are these days the greatest inventions of that. Wouldn't you then return to the banal commercial instead of the high brow piece of so-called real art? Yes, it's almost the Andy Warhol argument but then taken from the other side.

Warhol's work reflected the idea that society has lost the uniqueness carried in individually made items. Therefore, his art showed a world solely focused on making money and not on producing products of quality. Was he right? Or should be just alter our value system to suit our senses better?

Marshall McLuhan once uttered that “Art is anything you can get away with.” But yet, at its very core, the quote speaks to the idea that creativity and innovation often involves pushing boundaries and taking risks. Not every commercial one comes across these days does that.

Art points to a level of civilization. Civilization is the term Kenneth Clark used to point to what modern man or woman likes to define him or herself with. As a great art connoisseur he thereafter argued with passion that it still is reserved for high human sentiments like a sense of virtue or having faith.

Robert Hughes wrote about his anger with the depths that art has sunk clear in the essays gathered in a book with the title Nothing If Not Critical. He compared art of one century ago with the art of today and observed that even our best do not deserve comparison with the pioneers of modernism.

Back to the pretty pictures then, and the knowledge that some of them are indeed worthy of the label art because of the gathering consensus that it's a real treasure to behold. Real art should then add something to our individual life. I love it, so there. I can even defend that choice