What is art anyway?

I'm so sick of hearing about The Gates. What is the big deal anyway? If that is art, then anything can be.

I remember having to do some report in high school about Pop Art for a US History class. (I got a 98 out of 100 on the paper only because I wrote 9 1/2 pages instead of a full 10. Anyone that printed out words on a full 10 sheets of paper got a 100. This is why our country's education system is so lacking.) Anyways, the whole Pop Art movement was about making really banal everyday objects into art. There were installations, paintings, sculptures, all about soup cans, kitchen appliances, furniture, anything you'd find around the house. I guess it's really no different than an impressionist painting of a still life, which is essentially a bowl of fruit or something sitting on a table. I'm sure people back then were all whining, "How is THAT art? It's just a picture of what I had for breakfast."

Then there are works like Jackson Pollock's huge murals of splattered paint. "My four year-old kid can do that!" people always say. And I think I've actually seen some little kid selling splattered paintings like that for thousands of dollars because people believe that it's fine art. I guess anything that can make money like that is pretty admirable. That makes me wonder why there are struggling artists out there when a four year-old kid can sell his scribblings for thousands. I'm going to have to look that up on the internet to corroborate.

In college I was forced to take this class where we had to do three or four "art" projects. The last one was an installation piece. My idea was to make a little house and place it on a busy path and have people walk through it and experience what was inside. Inside, I put a table with three different sized bowls of oatmeal, and underneath the table was a tape recorder playing recordings that I made of people telling the "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" story in their own words. I thought it was totally brilliant. I kind of went out of my way to be "artsy fartsy". I really like those creepy modern art displays and installations where there is some sort of creepy soundtrack in the background and just weird stuff lying around, making you think "Wow, where am I?" and "Oh my gosh, what's going to happen next?" Maybe it would have been cooler if some big huge guy in a bear suit came out and scared all the people when they went inside the house. Which by the way, had to be moved off the path I chose because it was a hazard for handicapped people. And throughout the day, this groundskeeper guy kept helping me add more reinforcement to the shack that my friends helped me build using nails and 2-by-4s because the autumn wind was going to blow the darn thing over. It really seemed like a ton of trouble for a one day thing. But can you imagine if you saw that somewhere in Central Park? I would be soooooo totally famous right now. Don't steal my idea because I just might get the city to give me a grant to install my art. This time with the guy in the bear suit.

People can get fired for blogging, so watch out!

Read the story here.

It's kind of disturbing because the first blog entry they talked about in the article sounded exactly like something I would write. And I totally agree with her, it is stupid. :-P

The new "it's not you, it's me" is "you can if you want, but you don't have to".

When people ask you to do something but they really don't want you to do it, they can say, "you can if you want, but you don't have to". This puts it on you to figure out whether you truly want to do something or whether you're just doing it because you got asked or guilted into doing something. I hear this ALL THE TIME. I wonder if it's because I'm a total bitch and people don't want me to bitch about how "gosh! so and so makes me DO EVERYTHING!" and they want it to sound more like, "well, if you decide to do something, it's your problem." Or how they really don't want me to do it and then it seems more like it's not as big of a deal and how if I didn't do it, it would totally be ok.

But what it REALLY is (because if you ask around), is that people who say that kind of thing are just really nice and they don't want you to feel pressured into doing anything you don't truly want to do. But if it's anything for work, is there really ANYTHING you "TRULY WANT" to do? It's just work, right? You do it because it's work.

I hate it when nice people get to have excuses made for them. Actually, mean people get excuses made for them too, but it's more so people don't get beat up if they're overheard talking about the mean people.