Oh, just today I had some conversation, about what the art truly is, since today some people call bananas glued to the wall "art". Oh, or the performance I saw, where one guy pours a bucket of water on the floor, and other guy walks through it, and it's also called "art", just because author calls it like this.
Do anyone have some thoughts about that?
For giving a rational answer for this question, we have to ask another question first: " What do we define as art?" At this very point, I shall take advantage of Hegel's philosophy of art. In Hegel’s view, sensuous expression of free spirit constitutes beauty. The purpose of art, for Hegel, is thus the creation of beautiful objects in which the true character of freedom is given sensuous expression. The principal aim of art is not, therefore, to imitate nature, to decorate our surroundings, to prompt us to engage in moral or political action, or to shock us out of our complacency. Art is there not just for art’s sake, but for beauty’s sake, that is, for the sake of a distinctively sensuous form of human self-expression and self-understanding.
Perhaps Hegel’s most important legacy, however, lies in the claims that art’s task is the presentation of beauty and that beauty is a matter of content as well as form. Beauty, for Hegel, is not just a matter of formal harmony or elegance; it is the sensuous manifestation in stone, color, sound or words of spiritual freedom and life. Such beauty takes a subtly different form in the classical and romantic periods and also in the different individual arts. In one form or another, however, it remains the purpose of art, even in modernity.
Hegel’s judgment that modern artists are—and are quite rightly—free to adopt whatever style they please has surely been confirmed by the history of art since Hegel’s death in 1831. There is reason to suspect, however, that Hegel might not have welcomed many of the developments in post-Hegelian art. This is due to the fact that, although he does not lay down any rules that are to govern modern art, he does identify certain conditions that should be met if modern art is to be genuine art.
Hegel notes, for example, that such art should “not contradict the formal law of being simply beautiful and capable of artistic treatment” Hegel’s stance may well look conservative but from my point of view he's absolutely right. Art must be something beyond glues and bananas. Genuine art is to bring the marble to life, to ascelete an upper realm by tunes, to reach intelligible expressions by the words, to blow the spirit upon the harmony of shades and so on.
