h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If it makes feel, or has a real meaning and feeling, it's art. If it doesn't, its not. Simple as that. Whatever someone looks at that is made to be looked at and they feel a feeling is art, modern or not, in my opinion. Its true, a lot fo modern art lacks this feeling.

Bravo!

Only...what can make some people feel leaves others cold. And sometimes you have to be taught a little bit before you can see the point of something.

Well, maybe then it's art to some, and not to others?

Well...that's more a matter of taste. What I was meaning more is that sometimes you need a little background to understand where the artist is coming from.

Take Piet Mondiraan's square paintings (eg http://www.the-artfile.com/uk/artists/mondriaan/compredyellowblue.htm). At first they're just coloured squares and black lines. But if you're taught a bit about how the renaissance masters used to divide up their canvasses, and you're told that he's refering to them and wondering what the most stripped-down, basic kind of painting might look like...

Okay, how about we'll say if its something for display purposes that makes you feel something, or was done to represent a certain feeling of the artist's, it is art.

??

Well...some art is about art, rather than about the artist's emotion.

Example: Magritte's 'Le trahison des images' (The treason of images).
http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/library/images/336.html
'Ceci n'es pas une pipe'. It's not a pipe...it's a picture.

Other paintings can be about, say, colour...or lighting...or composition...or, as in Picasso's cubism, how do you represent the moving, three-dimensional images that humans perceive on a flat bit of canvas.

It's all very complicated

Who knows, maybe it's something thats made to look at???????

In that case, modern art would still be art, but seeing as it doesn't look very nice, it may be art that doesn't really fulfill its purpose.

The Encarta dictionary on my computer gives the definition of art being " creation of beautiful things: the creation of beautiful or thought-provoking works, for example in painting, music, or writing."

Note the 'or thought-provoking'. Is modern art thought provoking? A lot of it yes. Some of it is even beautiful. So I guess you can't really sum up all modern art as being rubbish, but then again you can't say its all not rubbish. As with all kinds of art, it depends on two things. The actual piece itself, and the viewer's taste or way of thinking. What is art to some may not be to others.

Well...90% of everything is rubbish.

I can think of plenty of conventional paintings that I've seen in respected art galleries which are just dire.