Chaos_Descending wrote:
But if art is anything that is considered art, it has no value.
Not necessarily. Some art has no value, and that's called "bad art". Art is simply a particular role that something can play, and it may play that role badly. For example, if I am a police officer, that simply means that I have been put into a certain social role -- it doesn't say anything about whether I perform that role well. I could be a horrible cop, but I'd still be a cop.
As for what makes art "good" art, well... it's a complicated issue, but essentially, as I said, it's mainly dependent upon how it affects the entire system of interactions between art pieces, critics, observers, etc., i.e. the institution of Art or "the art world". If the object, in its function as an art piece, serves to generate real, productive discourse and re-evalutation of how these interactions are structured, then it's "good art".
For example, Renaissance painters were innovators in that they introduced new and "better" methods of creating "realistic" images, which in turn changed both how future painters would paint their pieces, as well as how other paintings were viewed. (The standards were "higher", so to speak.) Later, the impressionists began to move away from strict realism, which led to new ways of thinking about and interacting with art pieces. Similarly, the Pop Artists of the 1960s questioned the very boundaries of art and the meaning of art in a quite direct way, which in turn led to new developments and methods of evaluating art. "Good art" is art that changes the way we think about and interact with art. [*]
[*] This is not to say that art is about "progression" in a modernist sense. It's not about the art world or the way we look at art getting "better" or "more advanced" -- rather, it's about different aspects of these things being played with, changing, and interacting with one another in new ways or in new contexts.
Quote:
To me, I would say that art is mankinds attempt to express emotion and invoke that same emotion upon onlookers.
No, I would say that art has nothing at all to do with the expression of the artist. That idea is simply an outdated leftover of the Romantic Era. Many of the greatest artists of the Renaissance through to the early Enlightenment would have never described their art as self-expression. Most of these artists worked under commission with very strict guidelines, and in fact didn't do most of the painting themselves -- all the great Renaissance masters had workshops where they supervised underlings, who in turn did most of the actual painting. The goal was not to express yourself -- the goal was to create something beautiful. (This was true in music as well as the visual arts -- look at Bach.) Only later (c. 1800s) did the idea develop of the tortured artist, struggling to express his or her unique vision.
Art is not about the artists, and their expression. Art is about the art piece, and its impression.
Sometimes details about the artists and their "intent" can add new perspectives to our understanding of the art piece, but the piece itself, and its relationship with other pieces as well as with the observer, is all that matters.