What is Art?

A long time ago I took a theater class at UNR (University of Nevada, Reno). For our midterm we had to do different scenes from famous comedy plays. I played Oscar Madison in Neil Simon's, The Odd Couple.

The scene we chose was the "It's not spaghetti". You can see the original production bellow. Basically, Oscar and Felix get in a fight and Oscar takes a plate of linguine and throws it against the wall.




I decided in our production, I would take the plate and instead of throwing it against the wall, I would throw it into the audience - It was a paper plate with colored fabric that looked like Linguine with sauce.

It went off without a hitch. I threw the plate into the audience and the reaction was perfect. Everyone started screaming and then there was laughter as the ones hit realized it was only fabric.

My professor gave me a big, fat "C". He said what I was doing wasn't art, it was a practical joke.

What is art?

National Public Radio recently did a program on the NEA's finding that over 78 million of us Americans create art. This includes traditional artwork like painting and singing to non-traditional artwork like building models or creating a blog page.

Is this Art?



The study also found that our viewing of traditional arts is going down. Not only are fewer of us attending art shows and plays but those who are attending are older.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is their more "Art Value" in attending a Broadway play than there is attending a comic book convention dressed as Princess Leah? What is a professional artist these days? I think it is just as difficult to answer as who is a journalist.

I think accessibility has really changed the paradigm here. If you take painting for example, an artist in the 17th century was a painter, a chemist, a tailor and a carpenter. There was no buying paint from the Dick Blick.

I feel very lucky, I can go to Home Depot and pick up a pint of discarded paint for about fifty cents. A good tube of acrylic paint can cost about three dollars and if you buy the craft paint it is about seventy five cents. A whole package of brushes only run you about four bucks and stretched boxed canvas is around ten dollars.

When I started painting, I got into it for less than a hundred bucks.

But is this accessability a good thing? Does it make the artist community stronger and more diverse? I say both yes and no. I've seen a lot of poorly drawn horses, barns, lighthouses and dolphins lately. The crap has overloaded the channel. I mean just go to Ebay and type "art". It is Dodge City all over again and there are many bloody bodies in the street.

I recommend that professional artists be a little more professional. I talked to many professional artists who have no idea what abstract, impressionism or cubism are. They are not familiar with great artists like JMW Turner, Gerorgia O'Keeffe or even Andy Warhol. My feeling is that if you do not understand the foundation and movement of art through time it does not matter how talented you are - your work will still be craft oriented.

Also, an artist must have an intricate knowledge of the materials and chemicals they use to create art. One should know at last the basics of the different paint types, varnishes, canvas and brushes. Presevering a work is almost as important as creating a work.