cdstacker

It's sad that people seem to continue to view sexuality as a binary thing we can define, especially regarding elephants.

Superchris129 said:

"Here's a scientific fact: Animals will fuck anything that moves- and then some."

Every time I hear about these people I want to find another guy and just starting making out with him in protest.. I'm pretty sure my girlfriend would even cheer me on.

While I get that you must be frustrated just remember, if someone is dumb enough to use stereotypes as an accurate representation of someone they are too dumb to bother with.
When a politician or journalist (or anyone speaking to a mass audience with a level of credibility) starts saying hateful things then it's ok to get pissed off, but when someone makes a stupid post on the internet it is not worth your time.

First I have to more years of study and then I am qualified to be a secondary teacher of English, Psychology and Social Studies. I'm also thinking of using my psych knowledge to become a school counselor. My dad thinks I'm crazy because I want to work in the public system like my old schools.
Secondly I'm in somewhat of a new relationship with a woman and I'd like to get this one right, take it a bit slower and more seriously than my other relationships.  
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Trying to define art defeats the very purpose of art. No artist likes being constrained within their medium and that is why constantly experimented. Poetry only exists because some writers got bored of prose. Arguing about what artists should be allowed to call art just seems like an attack on creativity. 

Gam3r3000 I strongly disagree that art must convey a message, especially a political one. This is known in literature as didactic art and it is a very popular and often used form. Didacticism is the idea that the art contains an underlying message and teaches the audience some form of lesson, be it moral, education, factual, etc. While this is incredibly popular and is featured in many of the greatest pieces of art our culture has it if most certainly not required. Once again I'll bring up Wilde, he believed that art was simply about beauty and anything else inside it is unnecessary, not bad but not required. A perfect example of non-didactic art would be Wilde's short story (and my favourite piece of literature) Lord Arthur Savile's Crime.

It also must be noted that didacticism often hurts art as the author must build to his lesson rather to their story. For instance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's sherlock holmes' story The Adventure of Yellow Face is often considered the worst sherlock holmes novel as it contains many logical fallices and plot holes. It is however remembered because it was written in the 1880s and publicly stated Doyle's stance in support of interracial marriage. This is often brought up as situation where didactism detracted from the artistic value. Of course the oppostie extreme is something like To Kill A Mocking Bird, a wonderful piece of art that benefitted greatly because of it's didactic purpose.
 
The point I'm trying to make here is that art does not require a message, Beethoven is another example of art for art's sake.    

I would go so far as to say that art does not even require a key element. I can't think of one Key element that written prose uses better than oral performance or poetry yet I still consider it art.

First I decided to sign up to reply to this post. I am currently studying English, Education and Psychology at the University of Adelaide.

First of all I find problems with the author's explanation of what is and isn't art. Oscar Wilde often argued that there are many forms of art which are ignored. The Picture of Dorian Gray can be read as an argument that the very act of living a life can be a form art, represented by the titular Dorian Gray. Wilde also believed that even murder could be argued as artistic (this particular argument had a lot to do with Victorian journalist sensationalism and must considered in context). The concept that video games as a medium are not art is incorrect because the categorization of artistic mediums has been created out of the need for stores,and the limits of the artists and the audience. Early books such The Odyssey were never popularly read during their time and were in fact oral performance. Many novels, such as Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, refuse to simply be prose and are constructed by a combination of prose, poem and newspaper articles, other writer's even change language during the text.

The concept that Cinema is an artistic medium purely because it created editing is incorrect. Plays, novels and oral performances constantly experiment and use changes of tense, view, time, focus and location. Cinema also began without sound (silent films theaters often hired local bands to play music which set the tone)  so under the author's constraints should we not consider the modern film's use of sound as part of the Cinema experience. The framing aspect of cinema is taken from photography which developed it out of painting and drawing. It also should be noted that the first motion pictures lacked editing, there was one camera, in a fixed position, filming a play. The idea that since video games did not create anything new and thus are not a artistic medium is ridiculous as it ignores the fact that all artistic mediums stem from oral tradition and the label of a medium adds nothing artistic to a piece of work. Autobiographical writing is still considered by some to not be artistic because it has a history in historical writing, regardless of the fact that Woolf's Moments of being and Stein's work is considered high art.

The idea that art must do or be anything is anti-art. The author who refuses to accept this view because it's "too Special Olympics" (an utterly disgusting phrase) is missing the entire point about art. No artist worth remembering would ever dismiss a piece because of its form or medium. An author shouldn't care whether you call there work a book, novella, story or autobiographical,  what would be important to them is that you read it. Every time an artist/s creates a piece of work they do so within the constrains and limitations of the medium, the medium is always a necessary evil and they exist only because artists are human and no human is smart enough to make a piece of art which breaks all limitations, Every single thing is art because art has no limitations, only the artists do and that is why we categorize things into labels.