So speak/write Russian?

I love sick and odd twists and cool quotes and I am glad to see such things.

it's non-sensical. It says nothing really, but people think it does which is the point

Cool: but you never answered my question. Do you speak/write Russian?

no

Thank you. So how do you know that those letters don't mean "My jock strap burns?"

i don't care if they do. I hope they do. the point of them was letter forms, not words. There is a meaning but you don't know it and i don't know it.

But if they do have a meaning, and someone can read it, does that damage the intent.

Enjoyable none the less. I just have to be a pest, so please ignore me when I get silly like this.

it's art. The meaning means something different to everyone. I think it would give a level of unintended depth. Too much of the time the artist has full control. Sometimes you have to make marks and decisions that no one can make consciously.

To some degree I agree, and on some degree I disagree.

I think what defines good art is how well an artist can convey an idea, emotion, or aesthetic response to most everyone. We always add our own meaning, but good art carries the same meaning to everyone before we add to it. But that's me, I am a weirdo who cannot make good art if my life depended on it.

being an art student i completely disagree. That's a Democratic opinion of art. One can say that the best art is that which is the purest form of expression of the artist. No one could ever really know his mind, not even himself. That is an undeniable fact that constitutes a subjective world, not an objective one w/ a perfectly universal nomenclature. Sometimes art is completely detached from a meaning at all, take some expressionism. They are feelings but they are not something tangible in any form that will translate to the other person.

Most fine art and modern art cannot be fully appreciated by the common man. They think it pretty and can't see beyond that to y they like it, or how it succeeds formally or subject matter wise.

There we disagree. Even art with no meaning has mean "this has no meaning." And all art is meant to get a rise out of people.

I have dealt with artist who try to rationalize and claim their art is above common art for mass consumption, like magazine adds.

Even the most truly bizarre advant guard art that you are talking about conveys all the same emotion and thought "Huh, what does this mean to me."

I agree w/ you on that. I mean that there is no conscious meaning that the artist is trying to convey. There will always be a subconscious or conscious one that the viewer will give. But saying that good art should appeal to the majority of people is thinking "efficiently" and "objectively" , that's "techne" not the "poeisis" of which i speak of.
There is a great into art that is the process not the end product. The feeling of paint drips is enjoyable in itself. Cutting tiny circles of paper is quite enjoyable too. It's not a technological thinking but more of a right brained one.

There is a great importance*

I never said appeal: is said communicate a thought or emotion to the majority of people. Guernica is a perfect example: most everyone who sees it is repulsed by it, but that is what the artist wanted.

So my definition or good and bad is how effective the artist is in his goal of conveying a thought, emotion, or feeling into people; not whether people will like it.

Even if you think there is no conscious thought the artist is trying to convey, he consciously decides to create art, therefore there is a conscious thought he is trying to convey, whether he admits it or not. It could even be the thought "I don't know what I want to convey;" but a conscious thought still guides him.

Now I do agree with your last statement. But just because the process is enjoyably doesn't mean there isn't a conscious thought behind it. I enjoy doing little squiggles and I have one pieces consisting of nothing but that. But there is still a conscious thought somewhere behind it, even if it is "this is fun, and I want to do it."

I would say that for modern people Guernica is not repulsive w/ all the images of death they see it's rather displacing than encompassing b/c of the abstraction.

i would agree w/ you on conveying the message, but not all the best art really has a thought, emotion, or feeling other than the motivation to create something beautiful or ugly. He's not conveying a preconceived notion or trying to take something prior and translating it, but creating something to be judged itself alone. Take the Greek sculptures, what i think was the best art ever made.

if you say "this is fun, and I want to do it." then it's conscious, if you just enjoy it, it's not conscious. You cannot rationally make yourself enjoy something, by saying this is fun therefore i'm enjoying it; doesn't work that way. Or another way to take ur statement, that becoming continuous to what's making you happy makes it now a conscious effort to do something that makes you happy. In a sense that can help or hurt one's happiness but it changes the whole reason you were doing it in the first place unless you shut that out of ur mind again and just go back to not thinking about it.

99% of Greek sculpture did have a purpose: it was to convey religious dogma or political propaganda.

But, "this is ugly" or "this is beautiful," or heck, simply "I want to create" are all ideas and or emotions to be conveyed.

But you are right, the ideas can be something new or innovative: or mostly amorphous. But art still is meant to trigger an thought or emotion in a viewer; whether poetry, books, paintings, or sculptures.

Now your last statement: for your body to respond, you have to think about it. People chose to do things we enjoy all the time: it is usually the reason why we do it. Most of the time, the intended viewer for such art is ourselves.

I just hate going: "Art is too grand to be defined" because it leads to an elitism that is hurtful to art itself. I have literally seen a pile of dirt with nails in it poured on the floor. Why, cause the artist wanted to make art the defied expectations; which now that is expected, thus it does not achieve it's goal and is "bad." Or this: http://www.urbanmag.be/images/uploa.....thy01small.jpg Complex Shit, by McCarthy.