Real Art.

What is it about artists? What is an artist? Why do I hate most artists even when I love their art? Do people confuse art with expression? Just because you sit hunched over until all hours knitting iPod cases with little Japanimation character iron-ons and then sell the finished product on consignment at a trendy boutique, does that mean you're an artist? What if you were the very first person to ever do that? Then are you an artist? Or maybe you're an innovator, tastemaker, craftsperson, or other non-artist? Is the artist the guy selling his streetscapes from a folding table on West Broadway in SoHo on the weekends? Or the guy on the other side of the glass in the SoHo gallery with interminable white space and little red dots on what's been sold?

Then there are authors, musicians, screenwriters, even what, pre-cable TV, would surely have been called craftsmen: chefs, architects, interior designers, dog trainers... Is it shameful to be a craftsman when artists get the real status? What role does art play in our society? What role should it play?

So many questions. A Postmodernist might say there is no such thing as art. Art can't be proven to exist. There's no testing for art. After all, isn't anything art the minute its put in front of a white wall? What would Duchamp say? Why did a bicycle wheel resonate with so many people? Or a urinal? For that matter what about a photograph constitutes art? Isn't a photograph the ultimate non-art? It's just a "graph" of light as it hits photosensitive paper, right? Is the Sears Portrait Studio teeming with undiscovered talent? What about a painting of a photo?

Maybe art has some minimum requirements, like following a movement or school, attention to line, detail, shading, composition, context? That sounds a lot like craft. Or at least good craft. How about adding that art needs to evoke an emotional response or connect psychologically to an audience or even create lore. But then, that sounds a lot like advertising. At least good advertising.

I've been wanting to ask these questions since junior high school but they've always seemed so, well, junior high. I figured I'd eventually figure out the answers but here I am at 33 and not any closer to the truth about art. Maybe it's completely personal on the part of the creator and the consumer. And maybe only one of those parties needs to think something is art for it to be so?