# Art truely is in the eye of the beholder

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/art-truely-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/601879>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [November 4, 2011, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/art-truely-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/601879 "2011-11-04T18:33:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 47

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**Author:** ![fumster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e9c0ed/32.png) [@fumster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fumster)\
**Post date:** [November 5, 2011, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/art-truely-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/601879/47 "2011-11-05T06:48:16Z")

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> [@The\_Hamster\_King](#):
>
> Incomprehensible to who? To you?
> 
> Not every piece of art works for every person. The elitist idea that there’s some universal standard that all art has to adhere to is profoundly disrespectful to people who have tastes other than yours.
> 
> It’s fine to dislike something. There’s lots of art that I dislike. But the fact that you dislike it doesn’t mean that the people who do like it are deluded or foolish. They just have different taste than you do.

So is everything art? Is a turd a piece of art? Why not? Is it art if one person likes it? How about if no one likes it yet, but someone may like it in the future? Does it become art then? How about if I create something that I don’t consider art but someone else does? Are they disrespecting me by telling me I don’t know what my own creation is?

Defenders of crappy art like to pretend that they are anti-elitist, but it’s really quite the opposite. Women all over the world have babies every day, but some over priveleged white woman does it in a [gallery](http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/n-y-woman-performs-live-birth-gallery-patrons-114134233.html) and we are supposed to treat her like she’s an _artiste_ for some reason. Workers risk their lives expertly welding together beams 100s of feet in the air but someone who just learned to weld in art class puts two pieces of junk together and is better than them because he did something that was not useful.

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