I want to share my favorite piece of art that ever won a CAP Art Contest:
It's Dracoyoshi8's winning submission for what became Malaconda.
In every CAP, we attract a huge number of highly talented artists.
What make's Dracoyoshi8's great art to me is that it
moves me to feel something.
I love that sly expression on Malaconda's face.
On a technical level compared to a lot of CAP art submissions, Dracoyoshi8's submission wasn't nearly as polished. It's outline and lines weren't as clear as many others, it kind of has a grainy quality to it at the edges. But it's so masterfully executed on its concept that it is really outstanding to me.
Bear in mind, I have no artistic talent (as far as drawing, anyway) to speak of. So while I couldn't distinguish between similar levels of skill and determine which is technically higher, I think great art combines use of medium with the conveyed message of the art. If the artist tells you that it has to be interpreted, it's probably not good art. Sometimes the medium is meant to offend, like those cringe-inducing menstrual blood "paintings," which are basically just flecks of blood in no arrangement on a canvas. No, please no.
Some modern "art" is just laziness and stupidity being brought into being.
We call them "works" of Art because they aren't intentional laziness trying to pass in category under an "all art is subjective" asininity. People can get cynicism out of government, they don't need it out of art. Art is supposed to
elevate in some way, because images are generally more powerful than words. That is art's purpose, and this is what has made it powerful over millennia. It makes me sad to see people who are artists or studying art buy into the postmodernist notion that art is powerless and meaningless if that's how people interpret it. "It's all subjective."
If you hold to that philosophy, you've just made Art infinitely less powerful than it ought to be. Art can bring out the imagination into something that can be sensed materially. Nobody of good faith ever questions whether good art (even intentionally ugly pieces) is actually art, only whether uninspired and powerless displays of obvious laziness meet the bottom threshold to qualify for the category. People aren't disputing whether Picasso's edgier (ha! I made a funny) works are art, jarring and asymmetrical as they are. They're disputing whether period blood fleckled on a white canvas or a pre-made crucifix inserted into a jar of urine, or uncarved rocks glued to a pedestal qualify as art.
I wish society would stop debating the bottom of the threshold and start focusing on the actual emotive pieces of the day. There surely have to be some out there instead of this shock spectacle dreck.