I didn't say most things are art. I say people conflate political expressions with artistic ones. As someone who loves art, I find that somewhat disheartening, so I thought I'd debate it. It doesn't magically make the non-art from TFA into art, though. Certainly not if you start from the premise that art must have aesthetic merit.
> not if you start from the premise that art must have aesthetic merit
This is a semantic punt. "Aesthetic merit" is no less subjective than "art."
If there are grounds to debate whether something is art, it's almost always art. It may not be fine art. (Or art to your taste.) But there's a reason those are qualifications.
Functionally, I think arguing about what is and isn’t art broadly diminishes support for the things you probably consider “real” art. It makes it unnecessarily pretentious and gate kept.
I'm not even sure what a semantic punt is, but having "intrinsic aesthetic properties and the kind of contemplative experience it elicits" (my quote from earlier in the thread) is clearly less subjective than just "art" which has no inherent meaning.
To be clear, my definition is a set of observable properties about some object. You can debate who should to the observing (I argue "no specific person but the collective"), but it's still observable. "Art", on the other hand, has no inherent meaning. It's an assigned value.
> If there are grounds to debate whether something is art, it's almost always art.
I'm not convinced and I honestly don't see how that holds logically. I appreciate the fact that people are taught as much these days. Doesn't make it more truthful, though, just more collectively agreed upon.
> Functionally, I think arguing about what is and isn’t art broadly diminishes support for the things you probably consider “real” art. It makes it unnecessarily pretentious and gate kept.
I think not arguing about what is and isn't art makes it so "anything is art" for which a corollary is "nothing is specifically art" and therefore art has diminished value. There's no gatekeeping, just a desire to value and treasure artistic beauty.
> having "intrinsic aesthetic properties and the kind of contemplative experience it elicits" (my quote from earlier in the thread) is clearly less subjective than just "art" which has no inherent meaning
Does it? Aesthetics and experience are as inherently subjective as art. We're having a contemplative experience in this discussion, after all.
> appreciate the fact that people are taught as much these days
Most people have zero art education.
> not arguing about what is and isn't art makes it so "anything is art" for which a corollary is "nothing is specifically art" and therefore art has diminished value
I'm not convinced. One can meaningfully discuss the ontology of art--and its meaning, impact and value--without needing to precisely delineate its boundary.
Some things are absolutely art. Some things are probably not. In between is ambiguity. That doesn't diminish the value of anything; hell, that ambiguity applies to almost everything we treasure, from literal treasure and love to the internal distinctions between forms of art.
