I feel guilty for the grades I get in art class. I feel the pieces I do shouldn’t be called art, they are just drawings, sketches, and paintings. In other words, they are not artistic.

But what is considered artistic? Is there a standard to measure how artistic art is?

If we evaluate art on its aesthetics, many pieces will be disqualified. Because for pieces like Duchamp’s toilet and Maurizio Cattelan’s banana duct-taped to a wall, you can’t really tell if it’s atheistic. Especially in modern art, a lot of artworks don’t even have a concrete representation. With these cases, the value of art can’t be determined by if it looks pretty. Many artists also purposefully create art that is “disturbing” or “unpleasant” to the public, which is not “pretty” in the eyes of most viewers. But they are considered art.