Art is not pretentious.
People pretending to be artists are.

While at university I spent some time in the Fine Arts building for two of my electives. During that time I saw some truly incredible and beautiful stuff, and some stuff that I looked at and burst out laughing (which was the intended effect), but also I saw a vast amount of stuff that was done purely for shock value and conveyed nothing.

Building an elaborate articulated mechanism ending in a stick that moved back and forth and putting a dead fish in front of the stick? Hilarious. Wrapping everything in a room in cotton wool that you've dyed acid green? Shite. Making a gizmo that has feathers on it that has a motion sensor so that when you approach it the feathers disappear inside like anemones? Silly and brilliant. Wrapping your Subaru wagon in tracing paper and making rubbings of it and displaying them on walls? Pointless.

The real point of art is to either communicate something or to inspire an emotional reaction of some sort in the viewer. If it's just something random that communicates nothing and doesn't really affect the observer in any way, it fails.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 6 May 2008, 14:46, Reply)