I don't "get" art

This Emin person has gained tons of attention by displays so ridiculous that people thought they must be brilliant since no one had thought of doing something so utterly devoid of talent before.

From the Wikipedia article:

"In 1999 she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed — an installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed with used condoms and blood-stained underwear."

And engineers are supposed to be the scruffy, smelly disgusting masses of humanity.

And like one might expect, I still only really "get" art that has a close enough analog to the work I do. So... sculpture? Right out.

And like others have brought up, art is contextual. One fundamental fallacy I see people make is that all pieces of work need to be conceptually complete and self-contained. A lot of good art can only be appreciated in aggregate.

FWIW, I don't "get" any of the art in the article either, save for the photograph of the woman. It's important to know that for photography geeks, it's often not about the subject, but rather about geometry, tonality, color, and more abstract notions. After all, there's a huge genre of photography dedicated to the everyday and the banal, whose only real claim to anything is beauty in composition and light.

As with all art though, there are territories that are incredibly facile, and therefore tend to be heavy-handed. Pictures of kissing couples, that "ring in a book with the shadow of a heart" thing wedding people use all the time, portraits of the homeless, etc etc. Stuff that's conceptually and technically been done to death, and IMO makes the artist appear more self-absorbed than anything else. Likewise, my gut reaction to the "money against the vagina" shot is "how obvious and ham-fisted", but that's just me. It's a me-too "exploration" of a topic that's been explored to death, without adding anything new to the concept or discourse.

In general, if you want art that you might find personal connection in, look at artists without an ego the size of the moon, and run far, far away from ones that do.

Much like how a bad joke need to be explained and people ignore and get annoyed by bad elevator music. But, feel free to listen to that used car salesman selling that just like new 1971 pinto.

Most people look at art as if they are portfolio pieces in dribbble.com. (Hmm, I like this icon, Hmm, I don't like that color). But art does not merely reproduce the beauty of forms, instead, it gives language to the "soul" so that it may speak.

Protip: Keep an open mind.

But it's also not 0%.

Fortunately, I don't need to care. The art qua art crowd are welcome to their signalling parties and occasional strokes of insight, and I'm welcome to think the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer was really rather artistic, and by and large we two need not even cross paths to growl and yip at each other like two little teacup poodles viciously defending their turf on the matter of whose definition of art is correct. Viva la freedom.