Kionon wrote:aesling wrote:Then to the one person it will be art, and to the other it won't. I was thinking of a wider cultural interaction between the work and the people who view it, though. If a lot of people enjoy it, and think of it as art, obviously it's going to be a lot more successful as art than the piece that only one person likes. Even if a lot of people like it and a lot of people hate it, it's still provoking lots of serious debate. In some ways, the reaction doesn't really have to be positive for it to be art, if the creator's intent is to make people examine their assumptions (yes, I said the creator's intent; I said it wasn't AS important, not irrelevant). What I think really fails to be art is something that fails to provoke any reaction at all from most people, though I'm not saying something that everyone thinks is awsome is necessarily art if all people think about it is, "lol, that's teh cool" or whatever.
So you argue art as defined by popular election?
What about art not defined as art until later on, perhaps many, many years after it was first created? Plenty of literary figures did not get their due until long after their deaths. Are you arguing that what they produced was not art until they became popular?
That's actually exactly the situation I was thinking about when I made this argument. It may or may not be art before its rediscovery. But even if these great works of literature are great works of art before they became popular, what's the meaning if no one reads them, thinks about them, or talks about them? Popularity and art aren't the same thing, and I was going to say something else but I totally forgot where I was going with this point. I guess what I'm trying to say is that art at its best is highly interactive, and if it doesn't become part of the public consciousness, it becomes irrelevant.