Here's my beef.

You cannot have a discussion of the value of art without defining art and the way artists define art is almost always the way they define themselves. Critics, on the other hand, generally assume a negative definition of art (what art is not) that influences them just as much. Those who make? Inclusive. Those who critique? Exclusive. But eventually the exclusionists are forced by reality to include something they've hated (because it's successful) or exclude something they love (because everyone else hates it) so they must then redefine everything and retcon the universe so that they don't look like a bunch of people whose entire career is to be proven wrong.

Just take it to the surrealists: there's a spectrum that goes Escher - Dali - Magritte - Duschamp in order of mass appeal to snob appeal. A citizen is likely to recognize Escher in a TV commercial. An art snob is likely to consider Duschamp too mainstream because he's in the Tate, not the Staadelik or whatever. Yet Escher was rich in his own lifetime while Duschamp is still fought over. Urinal with someone else's name scrawled on it? GENIUS. Banana duct-taped to a wall? RIDICULOUS. Why? Because the fuckin' urinal was a hundred years ago. But why are we even talking about the banana? Because it was at Art Basel Miami (which is its own zen koan of ridiculousness). Meanwhile there was an undergrad at my college whose thesis was a Penthouse and a steak stabbed to the wall with a switchblade that has been entirely forgotten by the universe because there was an undergrad at every college whose thesis was the same.

And we teach that Escher isn't art but Duschamp is and then we have to stroke our chins and argue about whether a urinal or a banana or a steak-and-centerfold performance art piece is art when the common knowledge? The one we're supposed to educate our way free from? is that of course it's not. Fuck off with that shit.

Wanna see the most popular piece of art of the 20th century?

But what is it saying? It's saying "dappled light is beautiful and so are doric columns and so is the female form." Same year? Art critique was all about Picasso.

But you don't learn that Picasso because it doesn't say what people want you to take from Picasso which is "cubism" so when you say "Picasso" everyone always goes immediately to

Even now you aren't allowed to say shit about Maxfield Parrish for the same reason you aren't allowed to say anything about Thomas Kinkaid or anybody else. I was actively forbidden from writing a report on Bierstadt in High School because he wasn't "important" enough.

That painting, by the way, was the cover for the textbook for the class I wasn't permitted to write a report for. No, no. If you want to do American art, your only choice is Grant Wood or Jackson Pollock because we fucking said so. Now - name one Grant Wood painting that isn't American Gothic or, fuck, tell me what this painting is about.

Thing is? Artists care about what makes art art because they're trying to recreate it. Nobody gave a fuck about Joseph Campbell and the Monomyth until George Lucas explained that Star Wars was a paint-by-numbers of it and then all of a sudden, all screenwriters are required to read Hero of a Thousand Faces while literature students? Get to write diatribes about why Campbell is wrong. Because their teacher said so. Ask a literature professor why you're studying Poe but not King. Know what he'll tell you? "Because Poe is a classic." Point out that Stephen King has sold 350 million copies of his books and he'll tell you that popular taste doesn't dictate what art is.

he does.

Then ask him why you had to read Last of the Mohicans but wait a bit because he'll probably see the trap: you read Last of the Mohicans because it was really fuckin' popular in 1822. So. If people 200 years ago liked it? You're golden. If people like it now? It's trash. And that's entirely because there's no inherited wisdom about what is or isn't trash if it hasn't been digested through four generations of literature departments, and that's why they all deserve to die.