How to Make Art

 Before you can make art, you have to understand what art is.

A breif history:

Western art has a rich history, arguably dating back to ancient Greece. Of course, since visual artists historically have toiled with their hands, Greeks viewed painters and sculptors as we would today view cabinet makers; skilled laborers. In an attempt to get laid more, eat better and party with the Popes, artists in the renaissance reinterpreted the role of visual artists in antiquity to elevate their position in society. From here, western visual art was kind of like a snowball rolling down a hill of loosely packed snow. In short, it started an avalanch of rationalism that eventually landed upon abstract expressionism (think of a canvas painted white with a slash in it). Three hours later, when we finally dug Jackson Pollock out from under ten feet of packed snow, he was somehow still alive, but very pale and slightly braindead. We now called him Andy Warhol. He, along with a number of other avalanch survivors, created postmodern art. This lead Marshal McLuhan to proclaim:

"Art is anything that you can get away with."

This will be our working definition of art.

I can attempt to justify this definition by going on and on about death of the grand narrative or by poorly paraphrasing "The Practice of Everyday Life," but I'm not going to.

Remember, our goal is not to justify our definition of art itself, but to justify our creative (or non-creative) efforts as art. This is easy to do because "Art is anything you can get away with."