Dear people, posts in this thread are pretty embarrassing for a science forum.
I think the general outlook is a solid evidence on how people percieve human development in history.
What do you really think? That these people just started to spill paint randomly, suddenly developped an irresistable urge to draw geometric shapes, crap all over, or one morning after breakfast devoted themselves to building sculptures from corpses and to stuffing great whites?
Art has transcended 'beauty' and all its ideals more than a hundred years ago. It doesn't have to please anyone. It doesn't have to make you relax or emotionally receptive. Or vice versa. It's a form of expression. It is not required to be holy,good,right or about the truth. It's beyond and above every form of communication we know.
For something to be considered as a work of art, there are so many conditions, it cannot be put in a standart academic definition because the work is not required to cover all of them but only one. As the first condition that it's produced or reproduced and of course put in exhibition, that's enough. That's why the concept art is accepted as a cluster concept and it's considered as 'impossible' to compose. (I still believe we can find a way out, don't worry.) And which ones will be vindicated by history, that depends on the same conditions.
Isn't there any crap out there pretending to be art? Yes sure, many. As it's the case with everything.
Most of you are Westerners. And it's so IRONIC that the entire development of Western culture, concerning independent thought and human development is based on artistic development through history; a fight against anything oppressing the individual and critical expression now gets damned by its most citizens who, at every opportunity jump onto a wagon criticising anything Non-Western.
Tip: Did you know that only decades ago, people who cannot understand contemporary art was called "Palestinian" by the art philosophers in European, Anglo Saxon-American tradition in articles and academic writings.
I can go further and claim that, the whole artistic development in history is the reason of this never ending cynical -now become meaningless and ignorant- attitude of the 21st century individual.
Now, the painting that looks like something your kid would do in 3rd grade art class (I didn't even know people still used this pathetic cliché) is made at the begining of 20th Century and a perfect example of modern art. We are living in the hypermodernist era -where&when you need to learn art theory, if you're really interested in art- so it is ancient. It's already belonged to art history, it served its function and long been vindicated.
Tip: To put it like a 3rd grade child would understand: Contemporary art and modern art are two very different things.
I am not trying to be a smart ass. I feel responsible. If this was a physics thread, it would get violent soon after the half page.
To put Malevich in the same place with a 3rd grader is the same thing to post a thread in physics forum and write: "Heisenberg is a jerk! Um, because, I think he is." Or to claim that modern art ruined and rotted the concept of art is the same thing what Stephen Hawking said about blaming Einstein for the atom bomb; it's same as blaming Newton for plane crashes.
I demand inquisitive minds and historical perspective.