What is art anyway?

After 2 weeks I finally got off my ass and saw a bit of of Tours with some other students. The main attraction is the cathedral, which is located only a 1 minute walk from my house. I have a weakness for cathedrals, certainly not because of their utilisation but because every cathedral is a piece of art. If I think about how long the production of a tiny facade-fragment must have taken, I can’t help myself but love it.

We also visited a few museums – Tours has a loads of art collections.The enormous amount of paintings and statues made me wonder what qualifies it as art. Certainly, all of the pieces must have taken hours to manufacture and are technically outstanding, but so are some chairs/tables/sofas and still they are not generally considered as art, then again you have modern “art” where someone paints 3 canvases blue and sells them for 500k. It might sound strange, but to me 99% of the pieces exhibited at a normal museum are not art. They are well manufactured pictures, not more. To me art is something that releases an emotion; something that makes me smile, gives me the chills or intrigues me in a way I can’t explain. If I find one single painting in a museum that does that, the visit was totally worth it. The best example to show you what I mean is my favorite painting “Skrik” also knowen as "Der Schrei" by Edvard Munch”. ...actually there are 4 versions of this painting, all in different styles. This one's my favotite.
It is exceptional in so many ways that words can’t express how awesome it is (at least to me). In the museum right around the corner I found a painting that managed to creep me as well – not as strong as “Der Schrei”, of course, and the photo can’t nearly mirror the desperation and angst you can see in the eyes of that woman when you move really close to it, but it gives you an impression.
(click on the pic to enlarge it, so you can have a closer look on the eyes - then you'll know what I mean) Over and above that, I found a painting that made me smile – not because of its content. It seems like there was a time when it was easy to get away with plagiarism. On the description it said “Inspired by the Mona Lisa” Well…it’s a bit like shopping at the fake market in Shanghai and find a shop where they sell sneakers with a sign saying “Inspired by Adidas/Puma/Nike”. Hilarious!