I don't "get" art

That's an interesting and excellent question, strawman though it is. The thread you're replying to is an exploration of "Can you distinguish between art and non-art purely via the subjective merit and appreciation of the result?". But the question you're (really) asking is: "Given an attempt to define art, can that definition be widened to include everything, rendering it useless?"

Vice is the hipster's bible, or it would be if they weren't all so meta-contrarian.

Their stock in trade is irony piled upon irony forever.

It can perhaps best be summarised by this scene from Nathan Barley, a comedy about a magazine which is basically Vice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLAm21GwfXw

Primarily the last bit.

There are hierarchies in any kind of communal human activity. Art's not special in this sense. You can choose to participate or not. And it's certainly not a single hierarchy. Take your pick, if you feel so inclined.

My reaction upon seeing something like the lawn chair piece would not be to automatically reject, but instead it would be an increase in curiosity. Why is that woman sitting in the chair? Why is it happening in this venue? Why should I care? An artist is usually trying to evoke a response of some kind. WTF is a perfectly good response to get someone's attention. From most artists point of view, the worst possible reaction is indifference.

If I have any criticism about modern art is that the ideas often really aren't that new anymore; the vein has been mined pretty extensively. Doesn't mean the art isn't any good, or that it has nothing to say, just that the term "modern" has simply become another label for particularly type of movement that doesn't connect with its original meaning.

Languages change too ...

Labels, like "art" are human conventions. They are useful in the sense that they can communicate or convince. If you feel good about not calling a work "art", rejoice. But don't be surprised when other people who dig deeper might occasionally find something of note.

For me, the best way to understand art is to compare it directly with music (and the comparison holds very well, as music is a form of art).

Think about pop music, and your feelings towards it. Many of my peers think that much of pop music is usually a bunch of crap and hardly ever listen to the radio (myself included). People love to proclaim which music is 'the best' and which music 'sucks', and they also love to argue about it endlessly. But if you look at this from a logical standpoint, you are a dog chasing your own tail if you want to argue about music opinions. You are pitting opinion against opinion, and there is nothing concrete to support either side, which makes it an utterly stupid and useless argument to have.

Let's add some logic to the music argument, then, to actually make it productive. Here's a good metric - which musician has the most fans and makes the most money off their music. If this is the metric you are viewing it from, you could most certainly say that pop is technically the "best" music out there, then prove it with numbers. And there would be no debating it.

But I bet there are a lot of people squirming to disagree with me at this point. And they wouldn't be wrong. Perhaps popularity isn't the metric that defines the word "best". In fact, the word "best" is a stupid word to use in arguments overall. Just replace that with "most popular", "most lucrative", or "my personal favorite", and we have an argument that can actually be carried out in a civil manner and solidly proven.

The words "good" and "best" ALWAYS mean "in my opinion, good" and "in my opinion, the best". And like music, art is all about opinions. You can call anything art, and you can call anything crap. If you can convince enough people to think your art is "good", it will then likely become more popular and lucrative. This part of it is all about psychology, and taking advantage of people and their emotions.

My personal opinion about art is that it is a piece that evokes emotion in the viewer and sends some message about the world that the artist is trying to get across. The "better" in my opinion the art is, the higher the percentage of viewers get this message, and the stronger it resonates with them.

Hope this helps...

About my motivation: My wife shows her work and curates shows in the LA area. Consequently for the last 20 years I've spent a lot of time in galleries and museums. I was just trying to get across some of the thinking of the curators who decide what to put on the plaques. Not trying to get into an argument, particularly.

About "no critical consensus": Saying there's not consensus about meaning, doesn't mean curators don't know if there's value in the work.

Lots of times people know work is good, they just don't agree on why. It takes time to figure out whether it's a dead end or not, or to see where the artist goes with a line of work.

Here's another one: there's lots of work that is loved by even sophisticated collectors, but unliked by artists. (E.g.: large-scale paintings that "look like art" but are not new.) There's lots of work that is liked by curators, but not by many artists or collectors (e.g., work grounded in complex theories).

"arbitrary and picked by some insiders at their whim":

The artistic community operates outside your judgement and scorn. Go in expecting to learn something, and maybe you will.