Accepting All Art

Art encompasses everything. It is such a broad subject that it can be found in the most bizarre places - like a house's structural wall built out of beer cans. Artists are always trying to push boundaries and think outside the canvas, as it were. After all, why create art that has already been done? The inherent problem with this is that now, because so much has already been done, everyone wants the excuse to call anything art. Worse – society's etiquette teaches us that we should be accepting of it because of its status as “art”. It tells us that we should at least appreciate the attempts of one piece of art over the other. This can be good, and it can be very, very bad. If someone scoops up dirt into a cup and places it on a stool at an art gallery, why should this be called art? Just because it happens to be at an art gallery? Or perhaps because the cup of dirt was put there by a self-proclaimed artist. In reality, the cup of dirt is not art, but a sad attempt at using our cultural mercy as a gateway to acceptance.

The title's expletive is being used as an adjective as opposed to a statement. The idea of art that has not only pushed past the norm to the boundaries accepted by society, but has broken through into a realm visited upon by wide eyes and gasps is not a bad thing as long as there is some measure of ingenuity or effort. If I rip off my left arm and tape it to a wall and call it art, there will be wide eyes and gasps, but it's not art. It's a pathetic attempt at breaching the boundary without using any ingenuity or effort, and relying on society's leniency to accept it.

You may say Duchamp's Fountain is simply an upside-down urinal. Why is this art? Because it takes traditional art in all of its socially conditio...

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...what if the 16th guy is doing similar landscapes in human feces? Despite the health ramifications (and the disgusting nature of the art), his idea is still considered ingenious, and he is certainly attracting attention. As it stands, the attention he attracts may not be the most civilized, but I can promise his following would (sadly) grow if he were serious, and he is certainly grabbing his fellow airbrushers by the throat and saying that abrupt, well-known phrase. It may not seem like art to us now, but neither did Fountain.

In conclusion, it is important that art continues to be gauged on its effort and ingenuity in order to be considered art at all. Otherwise, our cultural tendons will weaken and give way to the unmistakable infiltration of nonsense and effortless trash. We should be accepting of all art as long as there is some semblance of effort or ingenuity.