What are the top schools/colleges to major in Art?

Has the "anything can be art" mentality of the 20th century ultimately hurt the quality of art?

• I can't help but feel that this whole "anything can be art" idea of the 20th century art has ultimately decreased the standard of QUALITY for art. Ok, so anything can be art. Can anything be GOOD art? Raphael is good. People want to look at Raphael. Lots of people buy lots of artworks by Raphael because they like it and it is universally acknowledged to be of superb quality. Beethoven is good. People want to listen to Beethoven. Lots of people buy lots of recordings of Beethoven because they like it and it is universally acknowledged to be of superb quality. The same cannot be said about a good portion of modern art, no matter how much you justify it with "it's art because it provokes a response/emotion" or "it's art because it's intended to be aesthetically contemplated" or "it's art because what is art anyway really?" or "it's art because art doesn't have to appease the general public" or "the question of good is irrelevant because it's still art" or any of those crap excuses used by every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a BA in art history. I could probably write a paper detailing how me staring at the far right corner of my desk with one eye shut, whispering the word "popsicle" three times, and then farting is art. Sure, it's art. But it's not GOOD art. Even assuming that all of the following qualify as "art," nobody can possibly tell me that this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fPSz-o4zzY is of equal QUALITY to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhHb-62BfpI or that this: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/waterhouse/rose.jpg is of equal QUALITY to this: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1197/747671938_84f5f84e27.jpg

• Answer:

  I'm a little reluctant to answer this because it seems like you're just asking for someone to confirm your opinion. You'll probably get a lot of answers from people ready to jump on the "modern art is all pretentious crap" bandwagon, which is a perspective I understand because I held it for a number of years. There were a few things that changed my mind, but that's a long story and there are more immediate things to deal with here. The biggest problem I see with your argument is that you posit that works of art can be "universally acknowledged to be of superb quality." I think that's untrue; we should be suspicious of the word "universal." Find me one work of art that people of every culture on earth agree is superb. Even if you constrict your definition to Western society, you have to acknowledge that many of the works we now consider to be of excellent quality have gone in and out of fashion over the last few centuries. Tennyson's poetry, for example, was well-regarded once and then fell out of favor for years and years among critics - only recently has it come to be appreciated again. I still think it's awful, but that's just me. The Mona Lisa only became fashionable quite recently in the scheme of things. Gothic architecture was derided during the Renaissance and is now widely appreciated. The definitive case is probably that there are innumerable "great" artists who were unappreciated in their own time, which again suggests that "quality" is subjective. It just doesn't seem like a constant, definable thing. The next problem I see is that you're conceptualizing most modern art as an undifferentiated mass, all indistinguishable from your hypothetical farting performance. *Of course* lots of modern art is terrible. Lots of everything is terrible. For every Raphael, there were a hundred painters whose work was forgotten long ago. This should not be surprising to us. It's true that modern is less popular now than it used to be among the general public. That's not really a good criterion for judging art, though. I think the most popular painter in America, for example, is Thomas Kinkade, whose work is genuinely terrible, large-scale commercial pandering. Part of what you're seeing is that the role of art in society has changed. Think about the "high-quality" works of art. What were their purposes? "Realism" was of high value for some time; it was mostly displaced by photography. Representing religious figures or ideas to the public was fashionable for hundreds of years, but there's not really as much call for that anymore. (The Church has a much smaller role in society than it used to.) Making portraits of rich or important people is still something that's done occasionally - see Lucien Freud for example - but the demand is lower than it once was. And even if there were demand, artists have grown more suspicious of the idea of glorifying the ruling class. In large part artists are asking the question "what can art be?" because continuing to make art as it was made 150 or 300 years ago is just not a viable option. They certainly haven't stopped caring about art, and they haven't stopped studying art. It kind of looks like a main thing you're looking for is obvious technical proficiency, which is something you still find (see Maplethorpe's photos) but the range of techniques has broadened considerably and the idea of "craft" has become a lot more diffuse. We can still kind of sort modern art into "good" and "bad" if we really want to. Good art sustains rich interpretation; bad art is derivative, uninteresting, or merely decorative. The role of art in society has changed, and with it the definition of art, and with that the criteria for evaluating art. You can argue that John Cage isn't Beethoven, but that's utterly missing the point of John Cage. His work isn't intended to be compared to Beethoven. The market for "new" orchestral music has gradually shrunk to mainly only include film scores and a few select composers like Phillip Glass; at concerts everyone wants to hear either Beethoven, Strauss, Chopin etc. or adaptations of pop songs. And there are good reasons for that; the world has changed. John Cage made serious music in his own historical moment. In short, if you're asking whether modern art as a whole displays less technical proficiency in an obvious way to the general public, the answer is self-evidently yes. It's not even worth asking. If you're asking whether art has actually gotten worse, I think the answer is no, and I also think that "quality" is a problematic idea.