That's art?

Spring is here, and a fresh start seems right at the finger tips, and thus the result: A new blog! Welcome everyone, thank you for taking time out of your day to read my lonely first post. I hope all my fellow University peers did well on their exams, I was lucky enough to only have one, but a million final projects instead.

This semester has been busy for me, I edited my major a little bit. I'm going from majoring in International Studies, to majoring in International Studies and Art Education with, hopefully, a minor in Chinese. I want to teach Art, Geography and Chinese. It's not the most practical major, mostly because it requires more schooling, and less because of the occupations that should follow. I have a dream! And I plan to follow it :D

I managed to take an art class the last semester, which brought up a question "what is art?". At a lecture, a guest speaker listed of methods artists today are doing in order to make their art. Some are stamping love letters for people, others are taking pictures of pictures and renaming them. There are those who actually paint things, but what they choose to paint is quite odd, like 3 white canvases, or a science essay(seriously!). There are those who have sat in a box labeled "copy machine" and let people drop objects in the box which they would later toss out the original object and a copy they made from various objects in the box (one person went to the extent of putting their toddler in the box). There's who preserve dead animals as well as possible for their art, people who make machines that do normal body functions, such as a digestive system that will puke if it eats too much, get gas if it eats certain foods and, well, poos. There are also people who tie up dogs and let it die as their art. What is art, what isn't? In a lecture I attended, the woman described how in the past century art historians would attempt to clarify that question, and how so many forms of expression would be labeled "not art" and yet were very effective in portraying the artists idea. And so, they tossed everything out the window, and something being explored right now is the very question of "what is art?" So, skim through the pieces above, let me know what which ones, if any, or all, are art, and perhaps why you think that. I encourage those who think all these are art to question "how far is too far". Should we give artists complete freedom for their expression? Should we create a standard of what is art and what isn't? What is that standard?

For the canvases that were painted white (and smooth, which takes some skill) as well as the canvases that were a painted copy of a famous science essay (don't ask me which one), they were apart of the same show. Someone made an interesting comment on them (don't ask me who! it was over the internet). It's popular in our culture to see white as a state of "nothingness". And the science essay was so hard to read that for the average person it was a bunch of nonsense, or nothing at all. Perhaps the artists objective was to question the idea of importance and the idea of nothingness. The science essay, which helped define a theory, that really doesn't affect our lives, yet we hold those who make such discoveries with high regard, do you understand where this is going?

what do you think? there's no wrong answer, what do you get out of these pieces (the only 2 that are apart of the same show are the ones I already mentioned) if anything at all.