*grumbles*... art snobs... if it comes from the heart, 'tis art, 'tis art!
While this is a noble enough sentiment... I cannot agree. There are artists that build upon the senses and there are artists who build upon ideas... as much as there are those who build upon sentiment or feeling. None of these on its own is any assurance that the result is ART. I hold ART to dearly to believe that we can throw that title around lightly to each and every scribble, doodle, and belch. The young girl's random musings in her diary... obsessions over whether Bobby really likes her, etc... certainly speak from the heart... but rarely attain the level of ART.
Marcel Duchamp played with the question of "what is art" and "when does something become art" nearly a century ago. Few understood his irony: Everything CAN be ART... but NOT everything IS ART. All that an artist can hope for with a degree of certainty is that with time and effort he or she will improve as a craftsman. Every artistic vocabulary or medium (painting, drawing, print, collage, assemblage, film, ceramic, metalry, etc...) is first and foremost a craft. I realize this in spite of the great respect I hold for the Renaissance artists who struggled to raise painting and sculpture and architecture to the level of the "fine arts"... something above the baser crafts of the blacksmith or the carpenter. But the welder can certainly be an artist (look at David Smith or Deborah Butterfield)... and there is no assurance that the painter will achieve anything more than the well-crafted image/object.
A work attains the level of art when it is acknowledged or recognized as such by the larger art community. The medieval illuminated manuscripts were created by scribes that would have never thought of themselves as artists... and yet their works are unquestionably ART. The illustrated books of the institutionalized Adolf Wolfli were certainly never thought of as ART by their creator... or by most of those who initially came into contact with them (more likley they were imagined as the ramblings of a madman)... and yet they are also ART. By the same token... not every mere doodle or scribble of the sensitive teenager... nor every well-crafted painting or sculpture by the academically-trained painter/sculptor is assured the rank of ART.
