A sadness and fakery has fallen over the art world. Awkward movements and scrambling sounds, broken drywall and torn paper rattle in the wind. Let us, the real artists, band together and rise up as a revolution and take back the Word. Let us take back ART for ourselves and or the masses that used to appreciate it but have had nothing to look at for fifty years. Revolt! Ye former nobles, take pike in hand and storm the walls of the art market, bring down the galleries and auction houses complicit in the Great Con! Set fire to the museums! but first run inside and grab out all the good stuff, the real art that remains in the cellars, the Cezannes' Braques and Earnst, the heros gathering dust and moldering away. First grab them and hold them secure until we've retuned Art to its rightful position at the top of mankind's achievement. Then we'll have a great judgement of all pretend art, we will hold it aloft against the Three Pillars of Art, and record the measurement, and then a great bonfire will set right the art world and rebalance our humble spinning globe alone in the universe.

THE THREE PILLARS OF ART

1. Beauty - Sincerity
The simple definition is that beauty is satisfying to the aesthetic, intellectual or sensual. This is true because nature is a living example of beauty in all its infinite parts. And as the children of nature, we are part of this beauty, and that is why we appreciate anything reflecting nature as being beautiful. We are conditioned to appreciate a horizontal line because of the horizon, and we are conditioned to appreciate the vertical because of gravity. So as creatures of this natural planet, we have a powerful subconscious identification with nature. We call this beauty.

The other aspect of this principle is sincerity, that honest effort is all it takes, as imperfect humans, all we can do is make a sincere effort. But fortunately, beauty is relative. It gets better as it goes up the scale. High end art is very unusual among humans, but attainable in rare instances. Observe the Haga Sofia or Michelangelo's Pieta.  Beauty can also transcend the objective to characterize the intellectual. This aspect of Art is so rare it hardly needs to be raised, but for arguments sake, let's just say that conceptual art comes from this tradition and has been blindly wandering in the wilderness since Duchamp.

So that is how we should understand art. If it looks as if it could have been created by nature-- it can be beautiful. It does not require accepted cultural forms to attain beauty. Even death and destruction can be rendered with dignity. As in nature an old lion that seeks a concealed glade in the forest to wait for his death. As a great shelf of ice falls into the sea. The trick for an artist is to treat this subject with respect, as nature would.

2. Craftsmanship- Execution
Fine Art is well made. The form of construction is well matched to its material and its fabrication is rendered with skill to an appropriate finish. This level of quality is attainable by natural talent and long practice with materials and tools of the trade, and is readily apparent while viewing the piece.

3. Meaning - Purpose - Relevance
In the beginning, the purpose of art was illustration and decoration. In Africa the decoration of masks, tools and daily utensils predated and provided formative inspiration for the departure from classical art. All the big names of art learned from these early examples of man-made beauty and codified it into styles from cubism to modernism.

Then artists began to experiment with the image, they found that color and line and other pictorial elements had power beyond illustration. They explored the limits and possibilities of art with just the tools and methods of a visual language. They invented abstraction. Throughout the 20th century regardless of style or method, the primary purpose of art was to communicate some level of honest beauty to the viewer.

Then in 1917 Duchamp coined the term Anti Art. Others soon followed and created Concept Art which redefined art as any idea that challenged traditional qualities of art. And eversince, conceptual artists have had to go to ever more extreme lengths to validate their art.

But as a human knows right from wrong without the aid of law or religion, every piece of art will be exposed to an honest appraisal. And without distracting artist's statements or seller's promotions it will be easy to see if its ugly, trite or poorly made, and it will be obvious that it is not art.