What is art?

Over Christmas, my two year old daughter greatly amused by step-brother and his girlfriend by presenting them with drawings that clearly were the equivalents of modern art staples of the San Francisco area--art that sells for up to $10,000 per copy as a print.

My justifiable pride in my daughter aside (as well as the hope of getting some of her artwork sold for such sums!), I must wonder if the art world has lost its course, if not its marbles.

In a sense, it has--from a walk through a university art school to my "A" for a pile of scrap wood (glued together and painted "manure" brown) to Picasso's confession that his work is in respects an extended practical joke, I dare suggest that the artists have lost their direction in a very real way.

But to really make this case, don't we need to know what art is? A poster to an earlier comment of mine makes the case; if we discard the classics, are we simply left with Thomas Kinkade and his buildings with three dozen chimneys and fire pouring out every window?

Perhaps it would be instructive to remember what, etamologically speaking, art is. It is not shocking people, as the modern artists believe, but rather a skill; as in "useful arts." Notably, most modern "shock artists" (e.g. Mapplethorpe) are more or less excluded from the art world by the historic definition.

And yet this is not the extent of art; if art is a skillful representation of the world, how do we differentiate Rembrandt from a photocopier, or von Karajan from a "boom box"? Is it not the way a work speaks to the heart and mind?

Again, here the modern art establishment gets another punch to the kidneys. Sorry, but shouting obscenities (standard NEA funded work) doesn't exactly speak to the mind, and the response from the heart hardly qualifies, either.

And Kinkade? His work does show the warmth of hearth and home, speaking to the heart, but hardly qualifies as a Rembrandt in either skill or message. Still art, though, which differentiates it from many modern artists.