What I Believe: About Fine Art

When I think of fine art – the sort of art that the Met or the Prado or the Louvre would display – I think of paintings, watercolors, gouaches, etchings, and drawings. I think of sculpture, large and small, in clay or stone or bronze or steel. I would also include some photographs and videos.

My definition encompasses the full history of artistic expression. From prehistoric wall carvings to ancient jewelry to Greek and Roman (and other) classical paintings and carvings and sculpture to genre art of the 16th to 19th centuries to Romantic art, Neoclassical art, Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, action painting, COBRA art, naïve and outsider art.

What I don’t think of when I think of art is, for example, a woman painting her body with feces. Or a pile of stones or driftwood on the floor. Or a discarded piece of machinery on a pedestal. Or a dented car fender in a frame. Or a woman dressed in a pink leotard making animal noises from inside an iron cage.

In other words, when I think of art – the sort of art I am happy to call art – I want it to have two things. The first is what some art critics call plasticity – that it is a physical object made of something. And I want it to be something whose aesthetic value comes from its visual self – how it appears to my eyes.

When art is plastic and visible, it can be seen and judged according to its plastic and visible properties. It stands by itself, announcing what it is through itself. It doesn’t need an explanation. And I don’t want one. I want to judge it myself. I want to figure out whether it’s worth anything on my own.

The idea that anything can be a work of art is the core “insight” of conceptual art. The argument is that a urinal, by being placed in a museum, becomes something more than the thing it was before it was pulled off a bathroom wall. That, in seeing this utilitarian object in its new setting, the viewer gets to have a different and somehow more artistic experience of it.

I believe that is half true. When I encounter conceptual art in a museum, it does make me stop and think. But my thoughts are never remotely close to what the pamphlet or placard tells me the artist thinks I should think. My thoughts are, “What an utter waste of floor space.” And, “Seriously?”

If you want to be a conceptual artist, stick to the art form that caters to the brain’s capacity to understand and create ideas and concepts. In other words, become a writer. And if you want to be a performance artist, become a performer. Learn to dance or mime or juggle or tumble or act.