painting is like a pizza

What is art? Before I ever took my first art class here at the University Of South Florida St Petersburg I always thought art was just a picture in a frame. Now after taking history of visual arts, and intro to art, I now see that there a many different types of art than a painting. I've been browsing through the book, Why a Painting Is like a Pizza by Nancy G. Heller and I thought I would share some of my thoughts on this. Nancy says that, "art depends both on visual balance for much of their overall appeal and, though both can be judged by established standards, pizzas and paintings must ultimately be evaluated in terms of individual taste." I believe this to be true. While my personal individual taste for pizza is cheese, just plain cheese, my individual taste for painting takes on a much boarder range. The clincher for me to like this book is where Heller said “My position is that anything anyone says is art should in fact be regarded as art.” I agree with her because as a child growing up in a Christian family, I was always told that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and if you believe that, then you also can say that anything can be art. After watching the documentary “my child could paint that,” abstract paintings to me seem to be a waste of time. Most of the abstracts I have seen consist of a canvas covered in hundreds of colors, all mixed together to make one picture. Abstract has no purpose, and I feel like anybody could create an abstract and call it a masterpiece. As we saw in the documentary, Marla is this little four year old girl who for fun sits on the floor and mixes up all these colors to make her artwork. After she paints these abstracts, her parents were able to sell her pieces and make a considerable amount of money for these paintings. In chapter four of Heller’s book she has a quote by Al Capp which says “abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.” I agree with Al Capp fully