What defines art..

• What defines art..
• Heroes and Villians (some even of the 'super' nature)
• The New Media (Twitter, podcasts, etc...) and the future of how we get the news
• Michael Vick
• The constructs of family (continued)
• The Dead Weather - Horehound
• The Fiery Furnaces - I'm Going Away
• The Fiery Furnaces in general...
• Universal Health Care
• The Death of Paper

I know, I know - I've gone missing, like usual. Things are getting busy all over the place, but should slow down in a week or two. I hope. In the meantime, I'll try to do two posts a day to catch up, but no promises.

So today's topic is art - as in, what is? I'm obviously speaking to the all encompassing concept of art, not just pretty paintings and sculptures. Literal art, in many ways, is a dying form. Photography was on the rise a few years ago, but is likely going the way of the newspaper all too quickly. So where is our creative center moving to as a society? I think it wouldn't be far-fetched to say that television and movies are a form of art, but rarely live up to the expectations given by that name. Truth be told, they are little more than empty forms of entertainment most of the time. Probably about 80% of music maintains the creative ethos, but 80% of people listen to the other 20%, give or take. We have literature, another dying art form, which has it's superstars (Rowling, Meyers - although I'd argue her cred, I can't agrue her celebrity), but more often than not we fall back on the classics (Tolkien, Lewis). We have the Internet, which gives birth to youtube stars, but how far can that really take somebody? You can run a popular blog (like myself!) but the limitations are still present as to how far you can take your art. There's the occasionally far out college student who presents something newsworthy (the Yale student who repeatedly got pregnant in order to have abortions story, making the public reaction her true art piece) are passing fades.

So what is art now? What worth does it have off of college campuses? Are we moving into a society that values entertainment over artistic value (are we already there?) Is there any way back and is there any value in going back? Art has always been a way to capture society's undertones, but how do we save it?