Defining art

The students in question have paid back the grant money I believe, and have been severly punished by the Students' Union. For the rest of the year they have been banned from entering the Students' Union offices on campus - how cruel.

The defence the students relied on for the practical joke was to question the meaning of art. Defining art has always been a difficult exercise, taxing the minds of great philosophers over the ages who, despite their greatest efforts, always failed to come up with a satisfactory

solution.

But, as anyone with even a passing knowledge of modern thought could tell you, the problem is more linguistic than artistic.

Some things are definitely and substantially art, others are undoubtedly not art, but there is a grey area where interpretation as art or otherwise is conditional on other factors, for example, meaning or intention.

Before the 20th century, western painting and sculpture was basically

representational but with the

development of increasingly abstract art, the definition problem became more acute.

Artists such as George Braque, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse burst open the floodgates by completely turning their back on standard representation in favour of alternative conceptual images. Within a few short years the abstract

revolution initiated an animated debate as to what could and could not be

acceptable as art.

When the French artist Marcel Duchamp in the early years of this century, exhibited a toilet on the walls of a gallery in New York, publicly declaring it to be 'a work of art,' the debate was finished. Anything can be art and art can be anything.

The brilliance of Picasso, Braque, Matisse and other turn-of-the-century artists lay in the fact that they had the talent and skill to emulate the best of what had gone before them and were therefore able

to explode the boundaries of convention.

After all, with the invention and development of photography able to

produce perfect representation at the flick of a switch - the future of art needed to look in other directions.

The problem with art today is that its

proponents are so devoid of talent they are still trying to bamboozle the public with the boring problem of 'what is art?' Because the public would rather sit in front of the TV watching endless soaps, game shows and cookery programmes than stretch their atrophied minds into activities much more rewarding, hardly anyone has the knowledge to

discriminate between masterpiece and moonshine.

The knowledge that appreciating art takes a measure of physical and

intellectual effort, as well as the the courage to admit limitations of

understanding, is enough to make most people run a mile.

So when the latest so-called 'artist'

produces, purely from lack of technical ability, a pile of garbage or dead animal staking a claim for aesthetic consideration, there is hardly anyone around with the discernment to be able to say with confidence: "That's not art, that's a pile or garbage or a pickled animal."

What we should be saying to them is: "Go away - work very hard on what

little talent you have for a number of years, then come back with a perfect

representational piece of art you have

produced. Only when you have done that will anyone consider taking your pile of garbage seriously."

Given that condition, it would be

amazing how many shapeless lumps of concrete, piles of bricks, pigs in gherkin jars and other rubbish would disappear overnight, leaving the field open for

those few artists talent.

What the Leeds students produced for their final exhibition was nothing more than a puerile hoax which no amount of pretentious and spurious pseudo-

intellectual justification will transform into meaningful art. They may have great futures ahead of them, not as artists

perhaps but as successors to moronic

practical jokers of the stature of Jeremy Beadle.

However, I totally disagree with the idea of punishing them. The people who should be punished are the tutors in the fine art department of Leeds University. For three years they have been well paid for nurturing raw talent, developing skills, channelling creativity and

preparing these 13 students for a career in the world of art.

At the end of that period, the best idea their charges can come up with to display the multitude of skills they were

supposed to have learned is to go to Scarborough and pretend to be in Spain.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.