Art or con.

A cleaner at Ostwall Museum in Dortmund, Germany ruined a piece of art called " When it starts dripping from the ceiling ", worth a cool $1.1 by artist Martin Kippenberger, by cleaning it. Guardian Weekly, December 9. This so called art comprised a wooden tower with a rubber bucket beneath it. A layer of paint in the bucket was supposed to represent dried rain water which, to the cleaner, looked like dirt and she cleaned it off. So what is art? Is it worth the price that is quoted? The price may be a reflection of the fact that works of art, meaning paintings and sculpture, are unique and cannot be reproduced. This makes them relatively inaccessible to majority of the people on earth. Extremely few people can afford to travel to Paris to see the Mona Lisa, then to Florence to see Michaelangelo's David and on to Amsterdam to the Van Gogh museum. Also a lot of works are with private collectors who buy them as investment and keep them in secure vaults. We are thus dependent on critics' evaluation of the greatness or otherwise of a work of art. It is easy to understand a painting or sculpture which is like real life such as the David which one can understand and admire but it is impossible to understand modern art such as Picasso's Guernica even if it hailed as a masterpiece. An eye on the abdomen, a breast between shoulder blades, an arm sprouting from the middle of the forehead looks like confusion and meaningless. Then there is post-modern art. A pyramid of cans of baked beans, an unmade bed with crumpled sheets or a pile of beer bottles, ashtrays and coffee cups seem to be an easy way to shock people and grab attention. But surely it is not art. In that case the series of movies on chain-saw murders should win Oscars. The question is- do critics actually understand what is art or are they a bunch of pseudo-intellectual frauds using big words to impress us of their importance when they extol, what is essentially, a pile of crap? It should be simple. If it is not beautiful it is not art. It may be shocking, it may make a " statement " or " make us think by challenging us " but it is not art. It is just an elaborate con trick to delude people and making money. Like sub prime mortgages.