is officially irrelevant.

All things can be art. Nothing can’t be art. Everyone is an artist. All aspects of human existence are art. All human existence is art.

It took humanity tens of thousands of years to distill this pervasively propagated realization.

After all those eras of human progress, there you stand with your little opinion about an artwork, or an artist. Among millions of others just like you, all venting your opinions the way trees in a dense wood disperse pollen into the wind.

The degree of informed-ness of any of your opinions doesn’t matter. Equally informed people often take widely divergent stances regarding the same work or artist. 

Authentic, verifiable information, it turns out, has very little to do with opinion. Humanity knew this all along, the whole time we were learning that everyone’s an artist and all things are art.

The upshot is that your subjective opinions are grains of dust, so far as art is concerned. They lack even the fortitude sand grains possess to lay a tiny scratch here and there.

In spite of all these opinions blowing around, artworks and artists of every kind continue to proliferate. Their existences are inscribed forever in time, as indifferent to subjective opinion as mountains are to tourist photos.

The artist might hear an opinion and change an artwork, or change their very self, as a result. A neurotic artist lost to executive agency may flip around a thousand times over in response to opinions, the poor suffering soul. Others may single out an opinion about an artwork or artist and, through duplicating that tiny grain of opinion dust a billion times, create a boulder they can then use to attack the artist, discolor the artist’s name, build a wall between them and the artist.

But the opinions in and of themselves have no bearing on the artwork, or the artist.