> At some point along the way, art stopped being about trying to bring beauty and happiness and clarity into the human condition I’m no art critic, but you’ve

> At some point along the way, art stopped being about trying to bring beauty and happiness and clarity into the human condition I’m no art critic, but you’ve only described one purpose of art as far as I can see. Art is about communicating emotion. Some art attempts to make you feel “happiness and clarity into the human condition”, sure - but other works make you feel all kinds of things, including horror in disillusionment. I think this is why I see some value in at least the idea of Dada, while others look at it and see nothing worthwhile. In fact, in that case, the reaction of those people is itself part of the installation. I remember coming to that conclusion in a city museum, where someone had taken a (new, obviously) toilet bowl and installed it as a water fountain. I had never heard of Duchamp at the time, but I immediately felt like I was seeing something that was, in fact, “art”. I came away from it thinking things like “we all have preconditions that color how we see the world”, “objects with common uses can fit other uses”, “just because something fits a purpose, doesn’t mean it’s a good choice”, “people are pretentious for scoffing at this without even considering why it was created”, etc. The point is, it caused me to feel things, and think about things that I wouldn’t have otherwise considered. My youngest child at the time was probably 3 or 4, and I remember her sitting in a stroller and looking at me like horns had sprouted from my head when I took a drink from it. I filled one of her sippy cups from it, and she refused to drink it. On one hand - it was just a porcelain fixture with municipal water piped into it, like every other fountain that we’d ever used. On the other, the mere fact that it looked like something that she associated with human waste meant that she was unwilling to consider that it was clean. The way other people looked at me when I drank from it carried between amusement, shock, and outright disgust. At that point the bystanders became the “art”. Hell, my actions became the art when I drank from it. A couple of others followed, some shook their heads, etc. So… yeah. I got wordy there, but from my perspective I’d say that anything that evokes emotions in others is in fact art.