What is Art? Of course, it started with craft. The craft of making a bowl or a tool or

anything that created function. As humans became wealthier, we could seek out the artisan, the

craftsperson who would add an element of panache and style to the tools we used.

It's not much of a leap from the beautiful functional object to one that has no function other than to be beautiful.

Art was born. When art collided with royalty, religion and wealth, a match was

made. Those in power could use art as a way to display their resources and to insist that they also were deserving of respect for their taste and their patronage of the artistic class.

And that would be the end of it, except the camera and commercial printing changed the very nature of art on canvas (and mass production changed sculpture). When anyone could have a print, or a vase, or a photo, art's position as a signifier and a cultural force was threatened.

Hence the beginning of our modern definition of art, one that so many people are resistant to. Art doesn't mean painting, art doesn't mean realistic and art doesn't mean beautiful.

Marcel Duchamp

FOUNTAIN

The scandalous work was a porcelain urinal, which was signed "R.Mutt" and titled Fountain.

Duchamp described his intent with the piece was to shift the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation

Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square

Robert Raushenburg

Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, Automobile Tire Print (1953)

In 1953, the artist directed composer John Cage (1912–1992) to drive his Model A Ford in a straight line over twenty sheets of paper that Rauschenberg had glued together and laid in the road outside his Fulton Street studio in Lower Manhattan.

Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/25845#ixzz30aYpCvw6San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Jackson Pollock

Artist’s Sh*t

In 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni packed his feces in cans, signed and mounted them, and then sold them as art

Ai Weiwei

Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain.

Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon