What is art?

The article was very pertinent to my final project in the way that the article attempts to define graffiti as art. In my personal opinion, art is a thing both above the law and dependent on the law. One cannot argue that part of the novelty of graffiti art is that it is illegal. The law gives the act of ‘tagging’ a particular danger that I feel is an integral part of art making. I don’t find safe, ‘high school-esque’ theater enjoyable, nor would I consider it art. I haven’t thought about this in great depth, but perhaps a piece of the answer to the age-old question: What is art? is that integral danger; Something that is at stake. Whether it be an artist’s reputation, the conflagration of a widely accepted form, or the breaking of a law, I believe something must be at stake for the artist or the work of art itself.

My argument then begs another question: What about the intention of the tagger? Perhaps his intention was to simply mark a territory as mentioned in the article, and not necessarily to ‘create a work of art’. I then pose the question: can the tradition of marking one’s territory be an art in itself? At the Philadelphia Museum of Art a Japanese teahouse was erected, and an exhibit was too erected surrounding it. The Japanese tea ceremony became a work of art inside the context of this museum. So perhaps for a tradition to be recognized as an art form it has to first be recognized by a panel of curators in a particular museum who deem it worthy to enter the doors of their museum. Something about that unsettles my stomach. Why does art only have to exist inside a gallery? Who is to say that one tradition is more worthy of the artistic standard than another? Each of these questions begs much more thought and analysis, and will most likely remain open-ended until the end of time.