When teaching children to appreciate art it is important to encourage them to identify one aspect of a piece they find pleasing or distasteful.Art is about connecting good or bad.
I’m just an engineer, not an artist.
If everything is “art”, then nothing is “art”. Using this basis, then you open yourself up to having blank sheets of canvas, with a single splatter of “paint” selling for obscene amounts of money - and that’s happening as we converse. Zero talent, truly “Art by the pound”.
Art is effort, and much like anything worthwhile, it demands time and talent. Art should evoke a feeling, the more complex the feeling (such as “awe, amazement or humor”) the higher degree of artistic talent. I submit that Walt Disney evoked more emotional feelings in any of his works - any single piece you wish to point; than the entire collection found in the Smithsonian’s Modern Art exhibit in DC.
I’ve seen pieces of canvas, with “randomly” sized horizontal lines, crossed by “randomly” spaced horizontal lines, and each block filled “randomly” pieces of trash. And I do literally mean trash - as in debris collected from college trash cans.
I have seen colleges bring in “Artists” that specialize in gathering and documenting what they found discarded in trash, all collected in baggies, labelled on what was found, where it was found, what time, and what he artist was thinking as he gathered the trash.
Naturally, the entire Art Dept. MANDATORY ATTENDANCE presentation was strewn with trash pilled between rows, and on the folding chairs in the auditorium, to drive some obscure point of the “art that surrounds us”. I call BS.
A man with a good eye, an understanding of photography can create masterpieces. But, that is a talent. I have shot thousands of photos, some are worthy of being framed at home, most are not. But the man that can fill a book, magazine, or publish his work with such shots - has a talent.
I cannot draw, I wish I could. But I see both the skilled and unskilled treated “equally”; much the same way a person would treat a gifted sports athlete with a unskilled athlete. No one seems to have the gut to say “Sorry, this is not your skill set, this is meaningless gibberish”.
We have no problem doing this with actors, singes, doctors, lawyers, engineers, chemists, mathematicians, astronomers, carpenters or any other profession.
But, people tend to think that anyone can do art. I guess Leonardo DiVinci and I would emphatically disagree. Very, very few people have the talent to do art, and modern art is a great example that the Emperor truly has no clothes.