GREAT ART & WHAT IT MEANS​​
August, 4, 2025
by Mai El Mokadem
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Once upon a time, art was detail. It was oil paint layered over weeks. It was shadow and light, perspective and parable;
a fresco on a chapel ceiling telling stories of gods and guilt. Today, it’s… a square. Or a red canvas. Or a banana taped to a wall. Somewhere between the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and a dot in the middle of a white page, the world started arguing:
is this still art?
This is not a new question, but it’s one that’s come roaring back into popular culture as modern and contemporary works — usually stripped of traditional technique — dominate galleries and auction houses. Some find these pieces moving.
Others find them maddening. But beneath the scoffs and the praise lies an older, harder-to-answer question: What is art, really?
Long before a blue canvas could sell for millions, art was defined by its technique. In the Renaissance, art was synonymous with mastery, like Michelangelo’s David or da Vinci’s The Last Supper. These works weren’t just beautiful; they were technical feats, rich in symbolism and steeped in narrative. Art was, in a sense, a form of visual literacy, a way to tell stories when most
of the world couldn’t read.
But by the 20th century, that certainty began to unravel. Enter Marcel Duchamp. In 1917, he submitted a urinal to an art exhibition under the pseudonym R. Mutt and called it Fountain. He didn’t sculpt it, paint it, or even alter it. He simply recontextualized it. With that act, Duchamp flipped the script, suggesting that art wasn’t about the object itself — it was about the idea. “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it,” he wrote.
“He created a new thought for that object.”
That’s when things got philosophical. In 1964, philosopher Arthur Danto argued that what makes something “art” isn’t a set of visual traits — it’s its placement within the “artworld”: a network of institutions, critics, and historical context. In other words, a canvas painted blue isn’t art until someone (a gallery, a critic, an audience) declares it to be.
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Ask ten artists what art is, and you’ll get eleven answers. Across history, philosophers, painters, and cultural critics have tried to define — or deliberately refused to define — what makes art art. Leo Tolstoy, writing in 1897, believed art was first and foremost a tool for emotional communion. In What Is Art?, he argued that “a real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.” For Tolstoy, it wasn’t about technique or beauty; it was about whether something could genuinely transmit feeling.
Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian painter and pioneer of abstract art, saw it differently. In his 1910 essay
Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky claimed art was meant to touch the “inner need” of both artist and viewer.
For him, color and form held spiritual weight; a red circle could evoke emotion just as deeply as a painted saint.
His work set the stage for the rise of abstraction, where the feeling took priority over the form.
Mark Rothko, most popular for his vast fields of color, echoed that sentiment decades later. “I’m not an abstractionist,”
he once said. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom.”
A canvas with three floating rectangles might seem minimal, but to Rothko, it was a direct line to the soul.
And yet, Susan Sontag pushed against all that interpretation. In her 1964 essay Against Interpretation, she famously wrote:
“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” In other words, stop trying to decode art like a puzzle — just feel it.
Even more recently, Nigerian curator and art critic Olu Oguibe argued that the conversation about art often leaves out non-Western voices and definitions entirely. What one culture may dismiss as “primitive” or “craft,” another may see as deeply sacred or symbolic. In that sense, the question “what is art?” is inseparable from who gets to ask it — and whose standards are being used.
There’s another dimension to this debate that often goes unspoken: who gets to be called an artist — and who gets dismissed? Throughout history, art made by white European men has been revered as canon. The Renaissance, Impressionism, Modernism — these movements were largely shaped by white artists whose work was meticulously archived, exhibited, and critiqued with seriousness. Meanwhile, women of color and non-Western artists were often left out of the narrative altogether — or worse, tokenized, essentialized, and reduced to “folk,” “craft,” or “community” art.
When a white artist paints a single red stroke on a canvas, it’s called minimalist and conceptual. When a Black or Brown artist does the same, it’s often questioned, exoticized, or flattened into identity politics. It’s not that WOC artists don’t create with intention — it’s that their intentions are rarely interpreted with the same generosity.
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Scholar and artist Coco Fusco once said, “The art world claims to be universal while continually reinforcing racial hierarchies.” And that hierarchy doesn’t just affect who gets museum space — it affects who gets to be “lazy,” who gets to experiment, and whose feelings are allowed to be abstract.
This is the hidden layer of the “lazy art” discourse: what we’re really critiquing is who we think is allowed to take up space without explanation. For white artists, ambiguity is a virtue. For artists of color, it’s seen as incompleteness.
Even when WOC artists do create intricate, deeply symbolic work, it’s usually misread or flattened — either over-intellectualized or underappreciated. The bar is constantly shifting, and rarely in their favor. So maybe the real question isn’t “Is this art?” but “Whose art are we trained to respect without question — and whose are we still asking to explain themselves?”
In a world where a blank canvas can sell for millions and a red dot on a white wall is labeled a masterpiece, we’re left suspended somewhere between awe and skepticism — unsure whether we’re witnessing brilliance or bluff. The truth is: art has always been about feeling — but it’s never only been about feeling. Rothko wanted you to cry in front of a color field, yes, but he also studied years of technique and philosophy. Kandinsky’s wild abstractions weren’t random, they were built on careful theory. Even Duchamp’s urinal, the original shock piece, wasn’t just “anything goes.” It was a deliberate question mark aimed at the entire art world.
Critics of minimalism or conceptual art today ask, “Couldn’t a child do that?” But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the question isn’t how hard was it to make — but how hard does it make you feel? Still, that doesn’t mean every blank canvas deserves applause. There’s a fine line between emotive simplicity and lazy aestheticism. What separates a work of art from a mood board is intention. As the late artist and educator Anni Albers once put it, “Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.” The question is — did the artist mean to take your breath away, or did they just hope you’d project meaning onto the void?
The discomfort around “modern” or “lazy” art today is really about a bigger tension — that we live in an era that demands
quick hits and viral visuals, where deep feeling is rare and sincerity feels risky. Maybe people aren’t mad at the red square; maybe they’re mad that something so simple could move them at all.
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In the end, art’s job isn’t to be pretty, or even to be understood. Its job is to do something — to shake, to soothe, to confuse,
to clarify, to connect. If a solid blue canvas can do that for someone, is it any less valid than a Renaissance oil painting?
What is art? Perhaps it’s this: what makes you stop scrolling. What makes you pause, and feel, and ask something you didn’t know you needed to ask. And maybe that’s always been enough.