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What is Art?
Decades ago, I sat in a smoky café in Austria, arguing with leftist intellectuals about the nature of art. Walter, long since passed away, proclaimed, “Art is anything anyone wants to call art!”
I liked that definition. It seemed capacious.
I even had a way to visualize so-called “conceptual art.” In my view, the art involved whatever was happening in the artist’s life, say, the view of your bathroom from the door just as the viewer is about to step into it. The artist draws a big conceptual circle around whatever elements in it they wish to emphasize or draw attention to. They are essentially pointing out some aspect of our existence for a closer look. And that could be called art, whether it’s a photograph of it, framed just so, or an abstract drawing or watercolor representing the idea of the portal to your bathroom.
Over the years, I have collected digital art, that is, digital copies of real paintings. I started with Impressionists. I always liked them, and much of their work is readily available. Over time, other genres crept into my collection (e.g., paintings from Warhol, Bruegel, O’Keefe, Canaletto, Magritte, Mitchell, Dali, Morisot, Banksy, Vermeer, and Basquiat). While I was at it, I read up on the lives of the artists themselves and discovered, for example, what a shit Picasso was. And what a fundamentally decent guy Cézanne was.
