Art for the People (or just me)

You are all such thoughtful readers! I love to hear what you have to say about books, what scares you, what home means to you...Thank you for the food for my thoughts.

I'm working on a little something at the moment. A "to-do" list to end all to-do lists. And it's really taking all my attention at the moment. Well, that and the fact that Peanut still isn't quite napping with any regularity. At the moment she's been asleep for nearly an hour, (a record of late!) but living in the eternal "what if she wakes up in two minutes?" makes it hard for me to get into any deep thoughts or blog posts.

But now that I think about it, I do have a question: What's art? I've never taken any art classes beyond what was required of me in middle school and one in high school. And none of those addressed fine art and the kind of stuff you see in museums. This weekend we went to the Suntory Museum and saw a variety of modern art "pieces" many of which included or were exclusively comprised of digital videos. I found several of them to be really engrossing.

But then I began to ponder. How is this different from a short film that you might find in a film festival? What's to say this film gets exhibited in a film festival and that film goes to a museum? And I'm not judging here because frankly I like some stuff and don't like other stuff and it doesn't seem to matter where I'm seeing it (cuz that's how I roll). But *someone* has made the determination about what's allowed to be exhibited at the museum. How have they defined art?

Discuss.