The other look
What distinguishes art from mere craftsmanship or from kitsch? All three affect our aesthetic sensibility, but only the former fundamentally questions it.
Is that art or can it go?" This ironic question alludes to the difficulty of reliably distinguishing art from non-art. A famous example is Joseph Beuys' installation "Fettecke" from 1986, which by a hair fell victim to the cleaning zeal of a cleaner at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Why should five kilograms of butter under the ceiling of a studio room also be art? Just because an artist placed the lump of fat there - or are there other reasons?
The story of the "Fettecke" involuntarily makes you ponder: What exactly is art and how can it be defined? Is it solely in the eye of the beholder, is it purely subjective, or can objective criteria be specified? And what is it for anyway?
Another variant of irritation about art sounds like this: "I could have done that too!" That is to say, what is so special about these randomly thrown splashes of color or those objects that have been declared "installations"? Where the craftsmanship is not immediately recognizable, on the one hand it remains an open question whether one could have created "something like this" oneself without knowing the work and its relevance. On the other hand, the seemingly simple ideas are not necessarily trivial or obvious - especially when you consider the time when they were created. This is exactly what we usually find difficult because we are stuck in the thinking and habits of the present.
A pragmatic definition says that art is simply what is in an art museum. This becomes …
