From urinals to canned pop and machines that produce it, the idea of what can be called art has been stretched in the last decade to more than just the style a painting is made in or how a sculpture is chiselled. But the ever present question, apart from “Why?” is: “Where is the line?”

An interesting article on elephant.art reads: “The anything-can-be-called-art-these-days outlook is the cardinal cliche of philistinism.” The writers point, while big worded, is that the fact that anything can be called art is a hostile and indifferent position for anyone to take towards the arts. But is it really!?

The definition of what can be art has been pushed and stretched almost into oblivion by artists regarded as geniuses by our culture, so to think that anything can be art doesn’t really seem so wrong to me. It actually points to an important aspect of art: It isn’t the object that defines its status as artistic, but the viewer who experiences it.

It is though interesting to see that even professionals in the art world tend to shriek away from the obvious fact that their beloved heroes of the arts, who pushed the definition so far, didn’t just make their works into artistic objects, but made it possible for others to do the same.

Hopefully the problem of definition gets resolved soon and we embrace art as an experience, not as a physical embodiment of some godlike creative force. 

I have nothing against the idea of the artist as genius — there is a place for all the really passionate and capable people who know what they’re doing — but sooner rather than later we will have to accept that it wasn’t just Richard Serra who defined his giant heaps of rusty iron as art, it was the institution that sealed the deal.