Turbinosamente posted:

For some reason it's a media based line drawn in the sand. The craft arts are metals, wood, fibers, ceramics, and glass. Drawing, painting, and stone sculpture are fine art. Illustration is.... whatever? A lot of the confusion stems from about the late 60s through the 70s when the definition of art became "whatever you want it to be" so Literally a Person is correct with their joke. The 60s is also about the time when performance art got big and artists start purposefully pushing the envelope and you wind up with poo poo like this:


Bruce Nauman, Failing to Levitate in the Studio, 1966
I believe Nauman's deal was he deemed anything he did in his studio to be art, which includes actions like awkwardly flopping off a chair.



Both of these are by Piero Manzoni, the titles are Artist's poo poo and Artist's Breath from like 1961 and 1960. And yes he had his actual poo poo canned and at one point the balloon was indeed blown up with his breath in it. I hear some of the cans have exploded due to bacterial build up, and he did the balloon thing multiple times and they've all lost air by now. But again, it's all part of everybody collectively trying to redefine art and one up each other. Hell, you could argue it goes as far back as Duchamp's Fountain and the whole Dada movement if you wanted to.

The end result is nobody knows wtf art is anymore, and I'm going to blame it for a lot of modern and contemporary works being inscrutable.