But Is It Art?

Over the weekend, Mark and I went to the Portland Art Museum. I love going to the Museum with Mark because he always opens me up to portrait and landscape pictures; I'm missing the gene for picture appreciation and I'm more likely to go to a show with Mark. It's true that I often have a "why am I looking at this again" reaction, but at least now with Mark around, I have a better understanding for, um, craft.

 The other reason I love going to museums with Mark is that we usually think the same installations are hilarious. This visit's hilarious installation involved fake animals stacked into a pyramid and a mobile made out of wax heads. The other installation, which Mark called a visual pallet cleanser, was a collection of prints by Ellsworth Kelly.

 

I have to confess, that seeing Kelly's work makes me want to give an improv art talk using words like "explore," "juxtaposition," "dissonance," and "vis-a-vis." Cue DeForest Kelly as Dr. McCoy saying, "It's worse than that; it's _art_ Jim." But then I started thinking about a little more and asked the question, "What's the difference between Kelly's art and, say, these pieces here":

This was the piece I did that initially came to mind on the way back home from the Museum.
















This was something that I designed on the trip back, too. These two, especially ask, is a geometric grid automatically art?





 Maybe it's not so much about art as it is about design.  "Here the artist is exploring the relationship between the moon, opacity, and masks."  









This snowflake was created using a random number generator, which calls into question my role as artist. More likely I'm a curator--possibly at best a co-creator.







  OK; I just like this one--to me it's about connectivity and motion (and stars!).  Mark and I had an interesting discussion about it a few weeks ago. Mark think's it's geeky (and cold).  So maybe Kelly's art speaks to Art Geeks?










I was going for a Mucha vibe with this one, which Mark says I've missed completely.











I'm not saying that the pictures I've created with Blender are Fine Art worthy of being hung up in a gallery. Or... are they? Seriously, though, what makes a lithograph of a blue square "art."