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I have a question for you: what is art? Not according to Van Gogh or Picasso, what is art to you?

There is a dangerous misconception in our society that everything is art. The most effective way to spoil a concept is to destroy all limitations by broadening its definition to mean ‘everything’. Unlike art relativists claim, not everything is art, but everything has the potential to be art. This contemporary belief is damaging our ability to distinguish valuable art from effortless self-expression, blank canvases or literal trash bags. There are no rules about what art can or cannot be, but there has to be some objective criteria that draws the line between great and mediocre, even within the same medium.

Of course, it is only human to have different tastes. I may like Renoir, you may find him visually unpleasant, but no one argues the fact that his work is, indeed, art. As an artist, you are expected to like everything labelled as art or else you are considered close-minded and ignorant. Don’t get me wrong, I may enjoy a quick splatter on a canvas, but I will not appreciate its artistic merit. There is a process to creating art. Michelangelo stared at 18ft of marble for 4 months before he started sculpting and 3 years later that same marble became the statue of David. Now LACMA paid 10 million for ‘Levitated Mass’, a simple rock. If you listen closely, you can hear Michelangelo crying.

This view is extremely cynical and it is only generating an intense antipathy towards modern art and consequently damaging it. While people praise Malevich’s Black Square as if it was the artistic equivalent of, say, the Mona Lisa, starving artists are so desperate for any attention that they are underselling their work, living below the poverty line and, inevitably, starving their art, too.