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

Useful or useless?
Food for thought or just nice to look at?
A bit of all them I think

Life without art would be like life in Huxley's Brave New World. Which on the whole I consider to be A Good Thing.
Having said that there is a lot of pleasure to be had from art, and anything that gives pleasure is also A Good Thing.

Huxley was an interesting fellow, experimented in hallucinogenic drugs, also deemed the lower classes should not be educated and should work for the good of the upper classes among other things. So he didn't dig art? Pity, he has influenced quite a few artists. And mind bending drugs are surely very similar to looking at art in a way, as they both refresh the way we look at our surrondings and at ourselves

Of course Huxley appreciated art - Brave New World was his vision of a society without art - because everyone in it is happy (controlled by happy-drugs) they have no need for it, as art is born out of suffering and the miserable human condition. Though quite how much people like Damien Hirst suffer from the misery of the human condition is open to question.

The veritable cow splitter suffer for art? No way. He makes cash, and lots of it. Art isn't about suffering in this day and age - it's about having fun, money, sex, and other cool and froody things. Anything can be art and art can be anything. Sit in a bath of pickled whelks for a week. Walk round in circles until your arms fall off. Drink Gatorade without wincing. All these things can be art. And if you have a penchant for being a bit odd, walking around Oxford Street reciting the works of Enid Blyton in the voice of Mickey Mouse, or have a name that begins with two "f"s then just say your an artist and you'll get away with it. If you don't some people in white coats will drag you away to a rubber room and put you in a straightjacket.

Art is about opening windows of perception. Art is nothing outside of it's historic context. Guernica painted today would be pointless. Andy Warhols product, perversely, is art because when it was produced it changed perception. The same thing produced now would be meaningless, self-indulgent crap. The artistic product of the late twentieth century is Celebrity. Art has been subordinated to the cult of personality.

Now now, John, are you saying that there are no struggling and unknown artists any more? Claude Monet was a celebrity in his own time, but very few of his contemporaries were.

And of course art is born out of its historical context, how could it not be? Of course Guernica wouldn't be painted today, but that doesn't mean that some equally sociopolitically sensitive individual shouldn't (and may have for all I know) create a fantastic piece of art about the bombing in Serbia, for example.

What I lament is our media culture celebration of art dandies. They are the Art of our time.

It's no different to Oscar Wilde if you ask me. Maybe it's a fin-de-siecle type phenomenon.

Art is German for "thingy"

What is Dingchen German for?

Penis?

Does art have to be man made? Is like a flower.. art. (or a penis for that matter)

..and what about animals?
For example dog dodo... is that art?
Or does the artist have to be thinking "Hmm I am creating art now" for it to be art?

Flowers are not Art. Though, as a gardener, I believe that what one does with them, on rare occassions, can be. Likewise dog crap, a penis...whatever.

Art has to be a conscious act of creation. I don't believe that one can produce "accidental" art.

I remember a great old saying which explains what "is" and "isn't" art. One person reading the Times on the subway is not art. Forty people in the same train reading the Times on the subway - that's art!

Art must involve conscious creation of some sort, surely. And it must involve communication - so if you have 40 people on a tube reading the Times, that's only art unless someone consciously captures it and communicates it to an audience. Otherwise it's just a nice coincidence.

Guys this is cool, I am a recent graduate from art college where I did sculpture, and debate like this never exhisted there! Did any of you guys go to art college?

I came from Greece, I had a thirst for knowledge. I studied sculpture at St Martin's College.

Actually, no. Academically I'm a linguist, professionally I define communications strategies for monolithic high-tech corporations. But I maintain a healthy interest in the plastic arts.

What does that mean actually, plastic arts?