The Illusive Definition of Art

Defining art can be a tricky business, I've had several run ins where my opinions on the line between nonsense and brilliance have gone before me. But when it comes to my own artistic ventures, I have been fairly reclusive - only attempting to be creative on a few occasions.

Around 18 months ago my girlfriend and I decided to exchange paintings before we both left for university, a romantic and sweet prospect, and I have to say the gift I received was both thoughtful and a joy to behold.

Unfortunately, my smear-on-a-canvas resembled something more fitting to a mentalist's eruption of creativity, uncovered in an abandoned flat after a suicidal killing spree. Needless to say, it was not quite as well planned or well executed as the painting that now sits so elegantly on my wall.

Now, I wouldn't class this shameful painting as art, and yet others would do - well at least for argument's sake, they would.

The label of 'art' unfortunately blankets a vast area of what I would more accurately label as 'terrible examples of misspent time', and yet we are forced to respect and revere the views of the few who study art and whose opinions, for some reason, have an air of intellect.

I recently found, whilst wasting my life online, an example of this kind of art; the sort that has been so built up by pretentious artists and critics that it has cascaded over the brink of normality and in the end we are somehow left watching a woman being injected with horse plasma and expected to think it's amazing.

I would readily place my own shoddy artistic achievements alongside this life-threatening freak show, and yet some would hail it as a magnificent example of man's interconnectivity with nature.

As an English student - despite my best attempts to run away to do something a little more functional - I am constantly subject to these kinds of views. I am lectured on Freud's Oedipus complex and question my relationship with my mother, and I'm told about the theories of Platonic idealism relating to Essentialism whilst concluding that things are, on the whole, being over thought somewhat.

These theories, like sycophantic art forms, prevail despite their incomprehensibility. Whilst looking at these artefacts, you can try to fool yourself and dream up meaning behind the delicate brushstrokes, sentence formations, or casual eyebrow movements but it will remain on your part to fabricate these hidden messages.

As these art forms are impossible to deconstruct and understand, they rely on our own willingness to assign meaning to them. The various experts and professors of art don't deserve our high accolades and awards; they're as clueless as the rest of us, they just assert themselves with a little more gusto.

Which is why I can claim my own artistry to be postmodern, revolutionary and aesthetically pleasing whilst in full knowledge that, regrettably, my deftness with a paintbrush would fail to impress even the least cultured dormouse.