Your work has always been amazing! You make me look beautiful. 😘

✨ That's one vivacious vixen! ✨

🦊: Cytharia 🔞
#furry #furries #fursuit #fursuitmaker #vixen

As it should be

Thanks everybody that replied and chatted about this topic! It's past my bedtime. :3

Mmm.

You can try to give me a tummy ache.

An interesting dichotomy!

The first thing that comes to mind are those brightly colored iMacs from thirty years ago. They were innovative, but their forms were clearly designed artistically. Are art and innovation mutually exclusive?

Intent is where my mind goes, because I don't think a sunset is "art". A photo of it can be art, but in my opinion, art is a very human thing.

Would you say that a stock container is not art but if it, for example, had the word "VIOLENCE" graffitied on the side, it would be art?

I agree with that, though as I stated previously in these comments, I put a lot of weight into intent when it comes to art. That said, if someone makes something and insists it's *not* art, that might actually make it art. 🤔

I value your opinion because you are a person capable of perceiving what art is to you. Art doesn't just belong to artists. ❤️

So, given what you said, the shipping container would not be art because it does not transmit emotion between people? What if an artist makes art that nobody else ever sees?

I agree with this assessment. A lot of this, I find, comes from pondering these sorts of examples to try to prove my mental hypotheses right or wrong.

A lost purse in the art gallery is art if people observe it as such.

I'm really happy about the diversity of views I've received so far!

Does the viewer need to even exist, then? If an artist were to create an object, put that object in a case and bury it, never to be seen again, is the object art? Is the act of burying that object art in itself?

I suppose at the genesis of my discussion earlier I was trying to voice why the phrase "everything is art" reads wrong to me. The best I could really get to was that the intent matters, at least in my reckoning.

Mmm, absolutely.

I am reminded often of Duchamp's urinal piece. It is not pretty, it's not even something made with art in mind, but the intention of the artist to use it as part of his piece and the fact that it provoked reaction means, to me, it's absolutely art.

Another example. I write a script to do something functional - maybe to predict the trajectory of a thrown ball through the air. Is that script art?

This is more or less my position. I feel like that embellishment you mention makes the object closer to what I would consider the "platonic ideal" of art, but the ultimate example is art for art's sake.

A ballet performance will always feel more like art to me than McDonald's packaging.

I intuitively feel that a light switch where the designer put in minimal thought to how it should look and sound and feel is inherently "less art" than one that was created with specific, detailed attention to its form.

A fair view for certain! I agree with the assessment that they're not mutually exclusive.

It's hard for me to call the light switch, or any other artificial object, definitively *not art*. Choices were made along the line in its design and manufacture, but the intent is where I get stuck.

I suppose you could rephrase the two as the statements:

Everything that is beautiful is art,
and
All art is beautiful

I don't think I agree with either statement, but I would probably be more sympathetic to the first over the second.

We agree there, but perhaps for different reasons!

I think of art as a very human thing. If a human makes A Thing, physical or not, with a specific intent to "make art", then it's art. That's the closest I can really get to a definition.

I have two sets of feet to introduce you to, Cherry.

big stomper

Even those scribbles, one could argue, had some intent behind them, even if the intent was to pass a few minutes in class.

I suppose that goes back to one of my original questions. Is the sun art? Not a photo of it or a poem written about it, the physical star.

Of course, that's what the core of my question is trying to get at. :3

I guess as a follow up, if you were to draw a Venn diagram of "beauty" and "art", would art encompass *all* of beauty?

I used the example of a cat walking over spilled paint into a canvas. In a similar fashion, I would not strictly consider this "art", even if I found it aesthetically pleasing or challenging in some way, because there was not intent behind its creation.

This is about where I land. I think that there is a sliding scale. A light switch was designed with the main intent for function. Does it work? Are the materials cheap? Will it last? The secondary consideration was aesthetics. It could be art, but a painting is *moreso*, because of the intent.

My initial question and the debate that spawned it did not consider AI, but to engage on your point further, I would ask whether art created lazily is still art.

Is effort a requirement? Does that push us in the direction of a slippery slope to determine *how much* effort is required?

Absolutely, art is a very personal thing, and extremely subjective.

Here's a question: if you were to take an every day object and place it in a museum gallery where people considered it - perhaps even angrily or with confusion - does that *make* that object art?

Anything made by a human probably took at least some of those things, don't you think?

Though to take another step back, perhaps one could consider the shape of a cloud. There was no intention, or even human action behind its formation at all, so it would seem to fit this definition of "not art".