by Santi Meintjes

Created on: June 16, 2009   Last Updated: June 19, 2009

It has become a tenet of artists in the last fifty years to deny all responsibility for their art. They refuse to explain what they were trying to do or show or say, stating that the onlookers should decide for themselves. Consequently, lots of people have decided that this is such a profound attitude that the work of art must be extremely arty and they have paid fabulous sums of money to possess an object which neither they nor the artist apparently understand or even like.

What a scam!

Of course everybody has their own taste. There are huge sections of the economy that absolutely depend on this fact. Think about clothes, cars, houses, furniture, perfume, movies, books, in fact almost every trade depends on people NOT liking the same things. Naturally this includes that human endeavour loosely referred to as art. By the way, what is the distinction between art and craft?

In the past it was quite easy to decide what is art. Art was something that somebody liked personally, or something that was declared to be art by the experts. Then the experts became a bit ridiculous (look up the true saga of the monkey who painted modern art and who was raved about by the experts a few decades ago) and the common people (that's you and me who are not considered experts) lost their faith in being told what is and what is not art. So we all started to trust our own judgement and reverted back to calling an object art if we liked it. It was possible to concede that some things which we did not like personally but that somebody else likes, could also be art because we were tolerant of differences in taste but we instinctively knew where to draw the line.

And so the artists took the gap. They present anything at all to the public (the faeces rolled up in paper and putrefying lumps of meat that have made it into the art galleries come to mind) and when confronted by ridicule and demands for explanations they retreat into their ivory tower of you decide what it is supposed to be/say/represent. So we feel inferior that we do not understand great art and we fall for this new representation of art. What utter nonsense! What rot! We should be ashamed of ourselves for being led by the nose like that and even paying our money for it!

Individual interpretation of what constitutes art and what does not is as valid as individual interpretation of what is wrong and right. We are quick to allow people to commit horrendous crimes because they tell us that they believed what they did was right, not wrong, but we won't allow people to decide for themselves what is art and what is not. How ridiculous.

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